Amazon has sent a handful of emails to affiliates to give a heads up that they are making a platform change that will require updates to the affiliate code for some older product links, banners, and widgets.
Amazon is changing their affiliate tracking platform.
The deadline to make the changes is July 31, 2015. The affected ad units will no longer be supported after July 31, 2015.
The good news is that text links are not impacted by this change.
Since I like to live on the edge, I have been pushing this task to the future for a while, but I finally took care of it with five days to spare.
Fortunately, Amazon has a page for affiliates with the URLs that have ad units that need to be updated, and then the new code is a click away.
Starting August 1, 2015, any remaining links (text + image, image-only), banners, and widgets that are listed in the affiliate interface to change will be served with non-clickable public service announcements that will not send traffic to Amazon.
On September 1, 2015, these legacy ad units will no longer render, so they will result in a broken link on your site.