Early September I announced the GNOME Amazon Store. If you buy the stuff you normally buy from Amazon from the GNOME Amazon store the GNOME Foundation receives as a referral fee 4-6% of what you bought from Amazon. So at no extra cost to you you are helping out GNOME
Since then the GNOME Foundation received the following referral fees.
| Amazon.com | $3.88 |
| Amazon.ca | $0.00 |
| Amazon.de | €3.39 |
| Amazon.fr | €0.68 |
| Amazon.co.uk | £0.00 |
| Amazon.jp | ¥723 |
This totals to approximately 20$. I think it could be a lot higher if all Amazon purchases GNOMEys do would go via the GNOME Amazon shop. To make things really easy you can just install a search plugin in Firefox. It just works like the one that is shipped with Firefox with the only difference that the GNOME foundation receives a referral fee on everything you buy if you use the search plugin to enter the Amazon website.
Below and on http://www.gnome.org/friends/amazon you find the links to install the GNOME Amazon Search Plugin of your favorite Amazon store. NOTE the links below might not work if you read this post in an RSS reader, because it needs a javascript command to install the search plugin. Just install the search plugin by going to this post directly.
So to all your GNOMEys out there that buy stuff at Amazon please use the search plugins listed below to buy your stuff.
Tweeted support request
http://twitter.com/naesk/status/5249416124
Doh! I’d totally bookmarked this a while ago for future references… and totally forgot about it. I’ve made a ton of Amazong purchase (good news, i’ll be making plenty more the next few weeks too!) The searchlet will be most helpful as it requires no thinking on my part! Bliss!!
I’ll whack this on my blog too
Didn’t Amazon.com recently ban someone else who was doing something similar?
A search plugin is allowed. Ubuntu is also doing this. The search plugin of amazon they ship has referral tag of canonical in there.
You cannot make an addon for a browser that is adding referral tags to every link to amazon. See http://jaap.haitsma.org/2009/09/07/please-uninstall-the-friend-of-gnome-firefox-addon/
Where is the Epiphany extension? AFAIK this is still our official browser, even if distributions prefer to take a ride on the strong Firefox brand…
I’ll take a look at that
You won’t earn much money by simply creating the GNOME Amazon Store. Only few people know the store, even fewer people are interested in the products inside your store. And only a couple of people will search the store using the search plugin
We all buy hardware now and then. But we never know if $product will work under linux. Quite often you end up with items which don’t work with linux.
I would recommend to create a “linux hardware blog” or in your case a “gnome hardware blog” where people who bought hardware can describe if that product works with linux. Inside the postings you can use affiliate links to amazon. If this blog gets known to the linux community, you will be able to raise money.
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