Sometimes when I look at my report and see I'm selling Thousands of dollars worth of items and see my referral earnings and its just a 30 dollars. It makes me think how unfair this is, and what percentage Amazon itself gets from each item sold.
I guess it goes back to the question of, would you sell thousands of dollars worth if it wasn't Amazon, if it was some less trusted store? I guess Amazon is simple to sell, has the full range, and is still better than some stores (shop.com, buy.com pay even worse commissions). If you can find a decent niche and find a direct supplier to pay you commission, rather than a glorified drop-shipper like Amazon, you could earn much better commission, but would you sell as much? Swings and roundabouts... For me, eBay (EPN) still roolz, despite all the problems. ACRUs are just too good to pass up...
Absolutely their commission looking really unfair, even after all the positive things like big brand, category etc. Simply those are paying monthly $30-50 for a store setup/hosting, then they minimum need to make 10k annual sale to cover their annual fee alone
Yep, their commission sucks. Go to cj or linkshare. You can get real commissions there, 25% from lots of merchants.
I sold more than $5000 worth items during this month through amazon. (Christmas shopping season!) But my commission is just over $200 bucks. The commission rate is way low. But then, Amazon offers lot of products and they are better than buy.com etc. -Neo
Yeah Amazon commission percentage is low as compared to others but they offer the Amazon branding that customers trust. And so you need volume of sales to get a sizable amount of commissions.
gee... all you have to do is put a few links up and make $200 off their sales. most of the markups are marginal and giving you $$ for referring sales at $200 is pretty good. it's free money for the most part.
Its not free money, how you can say that its free money. you are giving kind of volume of sale to amazon by promoting their name and products. From $10K sale, what will be their average profit? it not simply putting link, for getting 10k sale, he have kind of works on his site to generate kind of sale. Only issue is that they haven't changed their commison rates as compare with other affliates site CJ, linkshare etc
you should try epn instead as Markowe said....you will defienetealy see a better difference...amazon takes two months to pay and cookies only one day....try epn and you will be happy you did...trust
Amazon is just for testing, after you sold one item youknow that the market actualy buys stuf and then you do your own product or you get better affiliate offers.
i'd have to agree with you. other's may pay a higher percentage but it's more difficult to get the sales - depending on niche of course. Also, CJ doesn't necessarily pay more, it depends on the advertiser - some pay more, some pay less.
agree that amazon has its flaws, but with 4-7% from the biggest online retailer, think it works. like the tools and its simplicity. good luck to all
For amazon to pay the 15 to 20% some would like, they would have to put up their prices so much non of us would ever make any sales. 7% is about all we can reasonably expect considering that they offer buyers 40 to 60% off many products. I am not sure where on poster gets the "$30-50 for a store setup/hosting" from ? I could run a site on a VPS server for less than that with many many amzon shops on it.
I promote products sold on Amazon that cannot be found cheaper elsewhere. They are very popular items, and if they were even $5 more than the competion my sales would be miniscule. There is no way Amazon could raise the affiliate commissions by much if they are going to compete. Of course, the more you sell the higher your commissions. Since Amazon is EXTREMELY competitive, this month I've sold about $63,000 worth of products and earned about $4,600 so far. I'll take it. Without the competitive pricing that Amazon offers there's no way affiliate sales figures would be what they are. Remember, this isn't clickbank where most items are digital (basically selling air ). These are very popular physical items.
Hi , For all the electronic goods the referral fee is 4% flat rate and the computer and accessories the max referral fee is limited at $25 and the others the commission is up to 8.5% when you have reached a certain level
Yah, as of writing this, I am 66 items away from 8.5%.... I have made $7800+ in commissions this month of December. Amazon may have lower commissions as others have stated, but Amazon does great at up-selling stuff. All of their "Buy this with this and save" "add $5.00 worth of items to get free shipping" "people who bought this also bought this".... Out of the 3000+ items I referred this month to Amazon, only 26% of them were the exact product people clicked on from my site.... the other 74% of the 3000 items were stuff either kinda related to my sites, or not at all related to my sites... those are all items i wouldnt have gotten a commission from. So yah, other sites may offer 25% of a smaller amount of items, but if Amazon can sell 3 more items for every 1 item i refer, and I get commission for all of that.... I'll take the 4-7% (or 8.5% probably this month)
It just seems to me like there are huge jumps between commission tiers. To get up to 7% takes a lot of shipped items.
You guys have mentioned so many postive things about amazon, I'm also agreeing with that, But % they are offering is really less, this is not comparison with any other affiliate sites, but comparison about profit they are getting from a $100.00 sale and % they are offering to affiliate(selling/refering).
Actually, my feeling is that Amazon is on fairly tight margins, especially with 3rd party items. Their prices are pretty low, so 4-7% could be as much as 30% of their profit by the time they've taken all their other costs into account. Most of the real high-paying affiliate programs are services rather than goods - hosting and whatnot. I believe there are not many retailers offering more than 10-15% through CJ. That's still a lot compared to Amazon, sure, but then there are all the other advantages we have talked about - huge range, good "collateral" sales. And good prices that attract customers. Have you seen how expensive sites like buy.com and shop.com can be (though their commissions are even more miserable)? They are just plain out to rip people off with some items marked up up to 100%!
Well, if I'm fair, I'm into my 3rd month as an Amazon affiliate and sent 2441 (free) clicks to Amazon, converted 10% of them and earned £689 this month whilst sending them £8700 worth of sales. Next month I'm hard at work again to try and top that. I have reached 6.75% this month, only hitting 6.5% last month, my aim in January is the next tier of 7%. I think the commissions are fair, as stated, conversions with Amazon are very good if you hit the right niche, I think that in itself is worth sticking with them. And of course, the tiers are there for a reason... as incentive. Once you start hitting a reasonable percentage you will start to see the differences in commissions, and that alone is what Amazon are rewarding. I have found it easier to do with amazon than on other affiliate networks and I also like that I can keep all of my concentration to one brand, it makes for easier tracking and organisation. Think of it this way: £8700 * 0.04% = £348 £8700 * 0.0675% = £587 That shows you the differences the tiers makes when sending Amazon sales value of £8700 in 1 month. I have also been awarded bonuses on top of that for some deep linked products. As for hosting, why not use shared hosting? Some hosting companies out there dont charge near anything you are being charged. I could create one site, £6 for a .co.uk domain name and £2.50 per month for UK shared hosting that I can host unlimited domains on. Once a site takes off and can afford its own independent hosting then I will move it so it has a dedicated IP address, basically it is paying for itself plus profit. Never put more than you have to into promoting and hosting a site. Keep going, dont give up, I certainly am not going to as I believe I can one day hit that top commission tier. TD