i sell as an amazon associate using AoM. I have a HUGE problem: Only a little fraction of what people put in their cart i actually get commision. Example: On one of my sites in the last 7 days i had A BUNCH of people putting stuff in their cards. NEITHER of those sales is accounted to my amazon account/ID. I have no earnings whatsoever. I get notification mails sent by AoM when people put stuff in their cards, so i know the amounts they buy. Same sales are in the $1000s ranges. There are only two possbiilities: (1) those people actually put items in their cart put then do NOT check out. I dont know how likely this is. As of right now i am guessing that only 3% (!!!!!) of my sales actually go through. Means lots of people put stuff in their carts, but never complete the sale at amazon (2) They DO checkout, but for unknown reason those sales are NOT credited to my amazonID. I see my amazonID and everything right set up and in the URL which is sent in the notification email. If this continues that way i plainly give up. Or i need to change AoM or get some way to KNOW when people actually complete a sale. Or i just totally give up on amazon because the work i put in is in NO relationship to the results. Eg. at this one site i get 80 visitors/day right now. I also started an adwords campaign etc..etc...etc.. WTF is wrong ? ADD: As a question: How does it look if someone buys via an amazon affiliate store...and then goes to checkout on amazon...but he is NOT a customer there yet, so he has to sign up first ? What happens with my associateID then...is it lost ? My Q is if there is a possibility that my associateID in the URL somehow gets lost. I just cant see a way that so many people put stuff in their carts, put NEVER complete a sale.
your ID does not get lost but there are quite many things that might go wrong. 1) The visitor did not checkout. This happens from time to time. 2) The person that checked out gave up at amazon's site. Usually I get a second add to cart email when this happens because the person hit the back button and came back to my site. 3) They just don't like the amazon checkout system Do not want to create an account... or they have already been on amazon and do not want to buy from there I use AOM on a site with 150-200 UVs/day and get about 1 order/day avarage but AdSense income from it compensates for the low order volume
Read GeorgeR's post here, towards the bottom http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=289488 He seems more open to the situation.