Affiliate marketing is finally starting to pay off, but Amazon Partnernet is turning into a real problem

I run a EU PC hardware price comparison site, solo. For most of the time I've been running it, revenue was close to zero, embarrassingly close. This month (14 days): €76.30 total, €20.18 via Awin, €56.12 via Amazon before my Amazon account got rejected again. Still small, but the first month that's actually felt like something real was working, and also the clearest sign yet that Amazon's affiliate program is a genuinely fragile piece of this to depend on.

What was actually broken for months:

• A geo-routing bug was sending cross-border clicks to the wrong country's store version, meaning a chunk of my traffic was literally not eligible for commission at all. Took way too long to notice.
• A data bug in my price-alert emails was comparing prices across different stores instead of the same store over time, silently generating false "price dropped" alerts. Unrelated to revenue directly, but exactly the kind of bug that erodes trust with users if nobody catches it.
• One specific store's affiliate feed had roughly 10 products silently going stale for months because a failed lookup was being logged and ignored instead of handled.

None of these were exotic problems. They were things that quietly broke and kept "working well enough" that I didn't notice until I actually went looking.

What actually drove the revenue increase:

• Fixing the geo-routing bug
• Awin traffic, steady and reliable, no drama, just working
• Amazon DE, after two rejections for having price-tracking/alert functionality on the site. I redesigned product pages to exclude Amazon from price history and alerts entirely, just a simple outbound link with a disclosure. Got approved, generated €56 in a few weeks, then got rejected again for the same core reason despite the fix.

The Amazon problem specifically:

Their policy explicitly bans any site with price-tracking or alert functionality, full stop. I thought I'd solved it by excluding Amazon specifically from those features. Apparently that wasn't enough, or their review process is inconsistent, because the same rejection reason came back even after the fix. Now I'm stuck deciding whether to do a much deeper audit of every page, or just accept Amazon isn't a reliable revenue source for a site like this and stop relying on it.

What didn't work:

• A "Pro tier" fake-door test for a paid alerts feature. Ran it for over a month. Turned out the backend endpoint recording signups didn't actually exist, so the "zero conversions" I saw for weeks was measuring nothing at all. Lesson: verify your test's plumbing actually works before trusting the result.
• Posting to new communities without checking their rules first, got banned from one subreddit for including a link. Now I check rules every single time before posting.

Still early, still solo. Affiliate revenue outside Amazon is finally working consistently. Amazon specifically keeps being a one-step-forward-one-step-back situation, curious if others doing similar sites have found a way to stay compliant with them long-term, or if it's just not worth the trouble.