Does Amazon give you commissions for all orders ordered through your affiliate link within the 24 hours? Example: Visitor comes to your site and clicks an affiliate link for an IPOD. They buy the IPOD after reading all the reviews. Later at 12:00 they think about Amazon again and look up a book They buy the book. Later another member of the family decides that they want a video game. They buy it on Amazon. All this within the 24 hours of the cookie. Do you get commissions for each of those orders?
As long as they don't buy the other items through other affiliate links then I believe yes you should be getting it.
Unfortunately this is not how this works. You only get credit on the first transaction. If the customer purchases 10 products in the first transaction (assuming he/she came from your site), you will get credited with all 10. However, any further transactions are no longer credited to you, even in the same 24-hour period, unless the customer visits your site and clicks through again.
Fahd, would love your thought on what Amazon should do to improve their affiliate structure. It seems reasonable to me.
He is right above ..the one ..only ..plus that senerio does not happen all the time so most often ...you are safe.
Well, almost every other affiliate program is more generous than Amazon. But I will say that on some sites Amazon is the highest converter because of their prices and the fact that everybody knows about them.
bestoptimized, Your last point is actually the most important. When choosing a merchant to feature, each affiliate must decide not on who offers the best cookie lifetime, or what fraction of revenue the program pays out. The most critical consideration (other than quality of the merchant) is how well does this merchant monetize the affiliate site. Because Amazon is such a well-known brand that conversions tend to MORE than make up the short cookie life. Secondly, Amazon offers such a breadth of inventory that even if the customer chooses to not purchase the item he originally clicked on, he is quite more likely to purchase something else that he was meaning to purchase. Overall, given the brand and conversion of Amazon, I believe that Amazon Associates is actually one of the best ways to monetize your site.