Amazon:They pay pathetic amounts for my sales efforts.

I'm pretty upset about this and I have decided to start a thread about it. Last week, for the very first time, my website at www.supernaturalminds.com successfully made an affiliate sell through Amazon.com. I sold a 10.00 book about Henry T Moray. The problem is, when I checked my sales stat, Amazon paid me only 76 cents?

What a rip off. They profited about 9 dollars and change from my efforts and the most they could pay me was 76 cents. That is a crap. At that rate I would have to sell tons of books just to make a decent profit.

That is not fair to Amazon's publishers. They should have at least paid 2 bucks. They would have still made a handsome profit.

Has anyone else had pathetic sells through Amazon?

 

Welcome to the reality of Amazon. Back in Q3 and Q4 2003 I made about $14,000 total. Last month I made a measly $91.39!!!! And this is with higher payout percents!

 

Why do you think that is? How could you have such a large fluctuation in sales?

 

I hate to bust your bubble and i normally don't even post in these kinds of threads, but i can't resist.

The book cost the customer $10.00 Amazon did not make a 9.24 cent profit. They have to pay for the book also, they also have other expenses. They work off selling volume as you need to do if you plan on selling books. You also know the commission Amazon pays.... as with most product based affiliate programs the commission is not much.

 

Competition. I was a moron back in 2003. I made a mod_rewrite hack to MrRats and did the worst thing possible...Gave the hack out FREE!!! If I had had the brains back then I wouldn't of even released it. So when the Google updates came a long, with all that other competition, my earnings started droping like a rock!!!!

I learned the hard way!!!! On an affiliate script I made for another program, I've been trying to keep quiet on that!!

 

Didn't you read the commission payout schedule when you signed up?

 

Makes me laugh thinking about the things I tried a year ago. Like using adwords to sell specific books, talk about a bad business model! I'll take the trickle of sales from search though.

 

hahaha, you need a reality check ;-)

you can make some money with amazon... but only if you are a good spammer...

 

Kaptain hit the nail on the head. think of the list of people who get paid out of that ten dollars:
The author
The author's agent
The publisher
the printer
the Shipping company who moves the product to Amazon's warehouse
Amazon
You

plus Amazon's overhead, various other people's overhead, the marketing budget...

You actually get a sweet deal. Amazon's Associate program is not a good primary source of income, but is a good way to add a few extra bucks to your site's overall revenue on a recurring basis.

If you are killing yourself trying to make a site that is purely dedicated to generating Amazon revenue, you need to find a new business model.

 

you will never make as much selling a physical/tangible product as you will selling a software/digital/informational product - the profit margin for the creator is lower cos production costs are higher...

 

i seem to be doing MUCH better with overstock.

 

Coming from a publishing background, I know the book industry well. I can tell you that Amazon are taking a larger and large share of the price of most books. They are in such a dominant position that they can insist on a larger share of the cover price of any book. While Amazon take 60%, the poor author who may have spent years writing the damn thing might only make 2.5% or 5%! Makes the 5% they give to affiliates seem generous

I wish the B&N/Amazon duopoly was shattered as they are taking affiliates, publishers and authors for a ride by taking a 60% cut themselves.

 

i honestly use my amazon affiliate myself and for my family. they buy from amazon anyway, and i have them go through me. i've only made a few hundred so far, but i don't even bother to advertise. it's a bad payout, find something better, this won't be a huge income source

 

Weren't you charging $50 for the mod rewrite code?

 

As much as I know, if you made first sale on amazon, you should get 5%.

 

For the first five months I gave it out for free!!! I shouldn't of ever started giving it out in the first place!!! On the first Google update after I started doing that, earnings started going down!!!

 

I agree with most of what is said in the thread of AMZN having to pay x others... My situation is very similar. I gave out 4000 impressions to the amazon product banners in a higghly targeted area... and gave them 86 clicks and 2 of those made a sale of 20$ and my payout 0.80$

meanwhile yahoo paid me more than 4$ for just 7 clicks in the same page silently in one of the corner...

Jeez, may be i would start trying out Overstock and see how it goes...

 

I believe it. A lot of big companies that offer affiliate programs these days are offering pathetically low payouts, which is a real shame to us smaller companies and individuals recurring sales and expanding their customer database.

If you're doing better with OverStock, or another company, just go with that. Amazon doesn't offer you any benefits, let alone any reasons to stick with them.

Good luck.

 

I also use Amazon and a question just struck me whilst reading this thread.Some of my links point to certain books and have had 150 clicks in a month with no conversions.That in itself doesn't bother me as it costs me nothing.What just struck me was this.If someone clicks the link to the specific book then decides they dont want that one and goes to another page (related books,search etc) and then buy a different book do I still get paid?

 

yep you sure do