Do you use sitestripe to fetch image from amazon?

Hi,
I have an amazon affiliate website. It's a fairly new website and im fetching images from amazon using amazon site stripe but I'm thinking of downloading and self-hosting the amazon product images because 90% of my successful competitors do that.

One advantage of using site stripe i assume is that it makes your site faster as images are loaded from external sources at the same time the drawback is it makes more http requests.

I don't have much knowledge about the SEO benefits of self-hosted images over external image sources. But here i assume that self-hosted images have a slight SEO benefit than site stripe images because your self-hosted images can rank on google image search and can bring you some traffic.

In the situation where I'm currently in, I'm in two minds whether I should use site stripe or self-host images.

What do you guys do? what do you suggest I do?

Self hosting images from amazon is forbidden, what your competitors are doing is: download image from manufacturer website or other source than amazon, edit it(add text/effects/background/etc..) and then self host it.
I won't do this since there is no guarantee that your account won't get banned by amazon.
Just use sitestripe and then switch over to amazon api and you should be ok.