4 to 7% referall ridiculous?

well said liquid ice!

 

No, it's something like

Book Image,
Book title (with link to Amazon product page)
and description.

I would like to know if there are any trusted charity websites that promote direct (meaning, that they maintain inventories, and ship) book sales? Probably, we can consider providing referral links to the relevant pages of those sites. This is not to offend Amazon or any other affiliate program, but to see which model suits us (given the parameters like page displays, clicks, conv. ratio, etc.). Any feedback is welcome.

 

Gee, I can't believe your banned.. NOT!!!!

Some of these posts are about as in tune with reality as el presidente is with basic math.

4% commission on a good that I do not have to stock, do not have to work to sell, do not have to depreciate, do not have to pay tax on, do not have to package, ship and restock?

Yeah, Amazon is a joke alright. They pay me money to do as little as possible.

This is another fine example of another leaker that has probably never even bothered trying the Amazon Affiliate program.

 

Your still missing the boat, your the one that's the most valuble link in all this. All of Amazons stock will be sale on return you think Amazon is going to take all of the risk of holding stock lol get with it if Amazon can't shift the stock they will simply return it and get their cash back.

Amazons mark-ups will be massive, and you can't even start to comprehend the buying power they have, they will use the brand of Amazon to their full advantage.

Also although Amazon will pay alot of tax they will have MASSIVE tax advantages.

So your happy making $4 on a $100 sale? I'm sorry to say it but I think the jokes on you! Amazon don't do the hard work, the real hard work is getting the sales, everything else from product to customer is all automated.

They will use their Monopoly like status to push everyone down to the bare minimum, after all you just another over head for them.

 

No, the jokes on you my friend. It costs me nothing to earn that $4. If I had taken the burden of the inventory, insurance, electricity, payroll, taxes, and on and on, as well as the cost of the product itself and shipping? Would I really be any better off margin wise in retail?

Seems to me many that argue against my points have likely never owned a business, or at the very least held a job in the retail sector.

Its almost like free money. Make no difference to me. Its more money for me I guess. YMMV.

 

Yes, in any business the real hard work is getting a sale. I guess Amazon sub-contracts all other works like stocking, shipping and invoicing. It is very likely all that they do by themselves is program management.

Could you elaborate on this?

 

may be we should all change to become a Dell affiliate

wow a full 1%

or may be staples

although to be fair to them some products are higher.

And as you can see from http://www.daylife.com/photo/0aRE4oA4FjgI2 amazon's stocking costs, building costs and heating/lighting etc must be VERY small as some have pointed out.

more about that building from http://www.discoverbedfordshire.co.uk/article.php?issueopen=1&id=10
"46,450 square foot" "In the Distribution Centre there are four different picking levels in the picking tower with 82 rows of shelves per level. To move products around the centre, over 5,000 metres of conveyor belts are used equivalent to the length of 500 double decker buses."
That can not cost much more to run than the average garden shed ?

The grass is always greener on the other side than you think.

Since so many think amazon is a rip off, why are they not saying where we could offer the same range of products and receive more?

Some of us just don't have the time to use 20 or 30 different affiliate programs to get a similar product range, and even if I did have time, my time would be worth more that the small extra income it would provide. I also prefare the ease of just one data feed script to handle my needs, although i do actually use 2 different scripts depending on the type of page the content is on

Of course i could probably make more selling the many scam e-books that there are for sale (yes i know they are not ALL a scam), or meds of doubtful origin but those are not the sort of things i would want to do, and would not fit in with any of the sites i own.

just my 2c

 

So your basically saying you value your time at nothing? If your not making the national minimum wage then screw it I mean what's the point? Go out there and get something that is going to pay you real money, If you think earning $4 on a $100 sale is time well spent, then by all means carry on.

 

What time? Did you even bother reading the entire thread? You're really missing out. Like I said..More money for me.

 

with all these problems, i would ask why people do not turn to cj, linkshare and clickbank?
is it true that you sell less with them?

 

I do value my time, but considering i can leave the same amazon link on a page for 4 or 5 years, then adding a link to a page, that only adds at the most 10 Min's extra time, or once i have a shop script set up, an extra product range added taking an extra 10 to 15 mins but will bring returns for many years.

I do NOT have to spend an hour of my time for each sale, so minimum wage per hour does not count.
One hour of my work could produce many sales per year and even more over a few years with no extra work.

Also, the 4% flat is only on a limited range on amazon USA, Consumer Electronics.

computers capped at $25 per item sale.

For products via Endless.com (via amazon) it is 15%, Kindle, mp3, game downloads, vid on demand..... at 10%.
The rest are 4 to 8.5% depending on total monthly sales.

How is it different to someone with a blog about legal things and gets $2 or even $5 for a click on google add's and is happy with the click value, but the legal firm then makes $5,000 or even £50,000 from the sale ?

 

You are forgetting traffic. One can't even make one sale from a ton of links (or products) if there is no traffic. How much time one needs to spend to get valuable traffic?

Google CPC is much higher than that of Amazon. For example, the effective CPC for Amazon products sales (for the month of Feb.09) for us is 1.2 cents (arrived at by dividing the revenue by number of clicks to Amazon site). Note that all traffic is organic and CPC (GAW). For the same widgets, Google Adwords charges in the range of .25$ and above per click. There is a clear advantage of $.238 for Amazon by using affiliate program (Using affiliates to drive traffic over using Google Adwords).

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1251809

At the same time, there seems to be some affiliates with good conversions. That's the silver lining!

 

I give up you win, plus rep for beating me down!

 

What's to give up? The most time I have to spend once these sites are in motion is the time it takes to look at my earnings report. I do that once daily and it takes like 2 minutes.

My point is, I am making money doing nothing, literally. Too me, that's a better return at 4% than retail. In other words, if I had to set up shop, have an inventory, employees, insurances, and all the other costs associated with owning a retail outlet, I'd be lucky if I recognized 2% when all was said and done.

 

Traffik Daddy, I think 10% conversion is brilliant. What do you think?

 

What does this have to do with Amazon and this thread?

 

and for those arguing about 4%, if you can't get more than 7 items sold in a month from Amazon, then your techniques are failing, not Amazon... I make more than double that monthly.... WITH AMAZON. I am usually in the 8.25-8.50% range. So, if you're still stuck on having to sell cool electronics, or you're in another niche and can't sell more than 6 items, then you're not good at marketing, period.

Comparing Amazon to the many ebooks out there (scam or not) is just not a reasonable comparison. Yah, it'd be awesome to make 45-65% on Amazon products, but that's never going to happen. You guys think that Amazon has HUGE markups on products, and that's just not the case for most products. I have sites in the video game niche, and Amazon price are the same as retail store prices, if not lower. I'm sure they don't get a better bulk discount that Walmart does.

The other key with Amazon is that if you send people to Amazon, they usually end up buying other stuff too. In October-December, only 26% of the items that were bought were the product they clicked on from my site. The other 74% were either related products but not the product they clicked on, or COMPLETELY UNRELATED products to my niche sites, that people just bought for whatever reason. So yah, with ebooks, you may make a higher percentage on a sale, but I was able to sell 3x more items with Amazon.

But, like someone else said.... if you don't like Amazon, better for us with great product niches, you won't be competition.... but, like I said before, if you can't even get out of the 4% range, you probably wouldnt be much of a competitor anyway.

 

Amazon, imo, is decent. If you are in the right audience. If you are already in the face of people who tend to see the word amazon and go "oh yea, I was going to buy..." and they go see the product and end up buying the thing they thought of, not even the product you link, but a multitude of other things, then it works out. Free shipping with 25+ are good for affiliates, I bet. Because when I see that kind of deal on something (free shipping), I tend to make sure I get that and whatever was my actual reason or item remembered I wanted to pick up online and decided to click the amazon thing.

It works when people are already in the mode to buy something, and it works whether the product you link was what they wanted or not. They might come to your page looking for a review and recommendation about xbox 360 and you were reviewing a game on the platform. They see the amazon link and go to amazon, using it just as a shortcut to get to amazon and check out and buy the 360. It depends on a lot of things.

If anything, there should be more varied percentages per category. But some categories, 4% is plenty, considering you make a sale for anything they buy in that session, and you go up in percentages with sales. Whether they get your linked product or not.

But links to items that tend to be definite buys and at a premium, these things should probably be adjusted.

 

Could you elaborate on traffic sources? As was mentioned elsewhere, putting a lot of product pages of Amazon doesn't get one buy unless there are visitors. It's hard to get visitors without a lot of effort promoting the site. (the site promotion may be in the form of writing unique and useful content, linking from established sites, etc.)

 

Originally Posted by Mia View Post
My point is, I am making money doing nothing, literally.

Still waiting for your reply!