Doozly
Twenty-four hours — but that is the short answer to the wrong question. Amazon’s own terms never say cookie. They define a session, and a session ends on the first of three events, only one of which is the clock. The other two close your window early, and one of them is the customer buying something.
Almost every article on this subject reports the twenty-four hours and stops. Below is what the policy actually says, quoted and linked, because a rule you are paid under is worth reading once in the original.
What Amazon actually says
From the Amazon Associates Program Policies:
… a single session, which is measured as beginning when a customer clicks through that Special Link and ending upon the first to occur of the following: (x) 24 hours elapse from that click, (y) the customer places an order for a Product, other than a digital product … (z) the customer clicks through a Special Link to an Amazon Site that is not your Special Link
Note what is not there. There is no cookie in that sentence. A cookie is the mechanism your browser happens to use; a session is the thing Amazon pays on, and the difference is not pedantry. A cookie sounds like a timer that runs down. A session is a state that three separate events can end.
The three ways your window closes
(x) Twenty-four hours pass. The one everybody knows, and the one that matters least, because most purchases that are going to happen happen far sooner.
(y) They place an order. This is the clause that gets left out, and it is the expensive one. If your reader clicks your link at nine in the morning and buys a phone charger at eleven, your session is over at eleven. The laptop they buy at three in the afternoon is not yours, even though it is comfortably inside the twenty-four hours. Amazon carves out digital products, so an ebook or a film does not close the window.
(z) They click somebody else’s Associates link. Last click wins, and it wins immediately. Your reader opening a second review in another tab is enough. There is nothing you can do about this and no point in worrying about it, but it does explain why comparing two sites’ reports on the same product is meaningless.
It is 89 days, and the clock never restarts
The other half of the answer is the cart rule, which is where the widely repeated “90 days” comes from. Amazon’s wording:
… the customer purchases a Product by adding a Product to his or her shopping cart and completing the order for that Product no later than 89 days after their initial click-through
That sentence corrects the common version twice.
- It is 89 days, not 90. A day is not much, but if you are going to quote a number, quote the one in the contract.
- It runs from the initial click-through, not from the end of the session. There is no twenty-four hours plus ninety days. The clock starts once, at the click, and never restarts.
- It covers that product, the one added to the cart inside the session. Not whatever else they put in the basket in week six.
The practical effect is real but narrower than the headline suggests: it rescues the reader who is interested today, adds the thing to their cart, and gets round to checking out a fortnight later. That happens more often than you would think with expensive items, and not at all with cheap ones.
Do Amazon affiliate links expire?
No. The link does not expire — the window after the click does. That distinction sounds pedantic and is worth a paragraph, because the two get confused constantly and the confusion leads people to rewrite articles that never needed touching.
An affiliate link is an ordinary product address with your tag attached. Nothing in it carries a date. A link you published in 2019 works exactly as it did then: somebody clicking it today opens the product, your tag is read, and the window starts from that click. There is no expiry field, no renewal, and nothing to refresh.
What is short-lived is the session the click opens, and that is what the rest of this page is about. Click today, buy tomorrow, and you have earned nothing — not because the link went stale, but because the window shut.
Three things can stop an old link earning, and none of them is age.
- The product is gone. Amazon retires listings, and a dead ASIN sends the reader to an error page or a search result. Your tag survives; there is simply nothing to buy.
- Your account closed. Associates accounts are terminated when they go too long without qualifying sales — the clock and the exact rule are their own subject. Every link you ever published then carries a tag belonging to a closed account, and none of them earns until it is reinstated.
- The tag is for the wrong country. A tag issued in one national programme is ignored by every other store, which is not an expiry either, but it looks like one when a reader in another country buys and nothing appears in your reports.
So an old link is worth checking, just not for the reason people assume. Look at whether the product still exists and whether the tag still matches the store — the link checker answers both in one paste, and neither question has anything to do with how long ago you wrote the article.
The part that works in your favour
Read the session definition again and notice what it does not restrict. It says nothing about which product the customer buys.
Inside the session, you earn on what they buy — not on what you linked. A reader clicks your headphone review, ignores the headphones, and buys a garden hose and a kettle. Both are yours. This is the single most under-appreciated feature of the programme, and it is why a twenty-four hour window performs better than the number suggests.
It also reframes what you are optimising. You are not trying to keep a window open for a day. You are trying to get somebody onto Amazon in a buying frame of mind, at which point their whole basket is in play for as long as they stay in the session.
The honest counterweight: the rate you earn on that basket was cut across most categories in April 2020, in some cases by more than half. We wrote about that, and about what it does to the famous examples, in the piece on Amazon affiliate website examples.
The window lives in a browser, not in the reader
Here is the part that undoes all of the above for a large slice of traffic, and it is barely written about. A cookie belongs to the browser context that received it — not to the person. If the click happens somewhere that context is thrown away, the window closes the moment they leave, however many hours are nominally left on it.
Three contexts behave very differently, and the difference is invisible from your reports — all three look like a click.
| Where the reader tapped | What happens to the window |
|---|---|
| Their normal browser, on desktop or phone | Works as documented. The cookie sits in the browser they will probably return to. |
| An in-app browser — TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, a mail client | The cookie is set in that app’s own webview. Close the app and the window effectively goes with it. |
| A link that hands over to the Amazon app | The click is attributed. Whether the app then shares the session with the webview that opened it is outside your control. |
The click itself is never the problem: the tag travels in the URL, so Amazon records it the instant the request arrives. The problem is the rest of the window — the twenty-three hours in which the reader was supposed to think it over, come back and buy a kettle as well.
Which is an argument for owning the page. A reader who arrives at your site from social and clicks from there is in their real browser. A reader who taps your link inside the social app never leaves it. That is one of the less obvious reasons a blog outperforms a social post per click, and it is worth knowing before concluding your content is the problem.
It is also why the platforms with the best reach have the worst windows. The TikTok piece covers what you can and cannot do there.
What it means for what you publish
Four things follow, and none of them is “write about the cookie”.
- The window opens at the click, so place the click where intent is highest. A link in the first paragraph opens a session for a reader who has not decided anything yet. A link beside your verdict opens one for a reader who has.
- Your own links do not compete with each other. A fresh click on your link starts a fresh session. More placements are more chances to open the window, not a way to cannibalise it.
- Stop optimising the twenty-four hours. You cannot extend it, you cannot see it, and the difference between a reader who buys in two hours and one who buys in twenty is noise. Whether they click at all is not.
- A click that lands on the wrong marketplace earns nothing, whatever the window says. This is the one that quietly costs money, and it has nothing to do with timing.
That last point is worth a moment. Your tag is valid in exactly one country. A reader in Munich who follows a link tagged for amazon.com lands on the American store and, more often than not, leaves and buys the same thing on amazon.de with no tag attached. The session was never the problem. If that is new to you, the piece on your preferred Associates Store ID explains where those per-country tags come from, and the OneLink comparison covers the two ways of dealing with it. To see which store a given country actually lands on, the marketplace lookup has all seventy of them.
Common questions
How long does the Amazon affiliate cookie last?
Twenty-four hours from the click, but Amazon defines it as a session rather than a cookie, and the session ends on the first of three events: 24 hours elapsing, the customer placing an order for a non-digital product, or the customer clicking a different Associate’s link.
Is the Amazon affiliate cookie really 90 days if they add to cart?
It is 89 days, and it is measured from the initial click-through rather than added on top of the 24-hour session. It applies to the product that was added to the cart during the session, not to the rest of a later order.
Do I earn on products I did not link to?
Yes. Within the session Amazon pays on qualifying purchases the customer makes, not only on the product in your link. Someone who arrives through your camera review and buys a frying pan earns you the commission on the frying pan.
Does the session end when the customer buys something?
Yes, for physical products, and this surprises most people. Once they place an order the session closes, so a second, larger purchase later the same day is not attributed to you. Amazon excludes digital products from this, so a digital order does not end the window.
What happens if my reader clicks another affiliate’s Amazon link?
Your session ends at that moment and theirs begins. Amazon Associates is last-click attribution, and there is no split.
Why do links tapped inside TikTok or Instagram convert worse?
Partly the audience, but partly the cookie. Those apps open links in their own embedded browser, so the twenty-four hour window is set inside a webview the reader closes minutes later. The click is still attributed; what is lost is the rest of the window. A reader who comes to your site first and clicks from their real browser keeps the full one.
Does the window carry across devices?
Assume not. Attribution follows the browser the click happened in, and Amazon does not document a cross-device behaviour you could rely on. A reader who clicks on a phone and checks out on a laptop is, for planning purposes, a lost sale.
Do Amazon affiliate links expire?
No. The link itself never expires and needs no renewal — a link published years ago still works and still carries your tag. What expires is the window that opens when somebody clicks it. An old link stops earning only if the product was retired, if your Associates account was closed for inactivity, or if the tag belongs to a different country’s programme than the store the reader lands on.
How long do Amazon affiliate links last?
Indefinitely, as addresses. The useful question is how long the window after a click lasts, and that is the 24 hours — or 89 days once something reaches the basket — described above.
Can I extend the Amazon cookie duration?
No. It is not a setting, a plugin feature or a negotiable term, and anything advertised as extending it is either describing the cart rule or is wrong. What you can influence is where and how often the window gets opened.
The short version to remember: twenty-four hours, ended early by an order or by somebody else’s link, with cart items carried to day 89 from the click. Everything inside that window counts, whatever they buy. And none of it matters for a reader you sent to the wrong country’s store.
