Amazon Associates Program Review
We here at Affiliate Project have been using Amazon’s Affiliate Programme since we started out in Affiliate Marketing. It has done us OK from a mixture of sectors, but I’m sure we’ve been missing out loads on referral fees which we believe should be paid to us for promoting them. As with most people, the frustration with Amazon is their 1 day cookie length. This may be OK for smaller items which don’t require a lot of thinking about like books, Cd’s etc OR if you are targeting the long tail keywords where the Customer is at the end of the buying chain, then you shouldn’t notice too many sales leaked. But when you promote more expensive products then you will most likely miss out on the sale due to the 1 day cookie length.
One thing that is good about Amazon is that they have such a strong brand and their products are generally the cheapest. This is where they hold you by your balls as you almost have to promote them if you are offering any sort of comparison site. Or do you!!!
Another Annoyance with Amazon is they now only appear to have 1 performance model for Affiliates. This is a capped performance. So for example if you sale a product at £300 and the default commission is 5% then you will only get £7 when you are due more than double that, £15. We recently have had several items sell at that price and are missing out on sales and our commission rate is generally going down. We also just sold an item worth £1500 and only got £7, this should have been £75 so our commission rate for that item dropped to 0.5%. Hardly worth the effort promoting it.
Again for smaller items the performance model offers increased commissions if you sale more items, but you do have to sell lots to get that commission increased to anything significant. Maybe this is the way there business is focused on bulk buying items like books.
Now I have both shopped with Amazon and worked with Amazon as an Affiliate promoting their products and I will now do my best NOT to promote their products and to promote other merchants products instead. It doesn’t inspire us to promote them as a merchant if they are not willing to help the smaller affiliates out there.
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2 Responses to “Amazon Associates Program Review”
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I agree with that although the 5% commission is quite generous – most of my other merchants offer between 2% and 3.5% I’ll only show Amazon products if they are the cheapest or only supplier.
The biggest problem I have is that some third party suppliers on Amazon constantly (several times a day) mess about with their prices – they take a few pence or even pounds off the price and add it to the delivery charge or vice versa. It’s only garden arches, hardly a fast moving market! The reason is that Amazon will show the seller with the cheapest price for a product (exc delivery) whoever that seller happens to be. By bumping up the delivery charge they can appear top of the list but still make the profit they wanted.
On my site I tell users that delivery charges are taken into account when showing the best price for an item – this can make a big difference. I could automate the prices via the Amazon api but you cannot get the delivery costs can you?
I would drop them but they are quite popular products so I’ll keep updating manually for now.
Keep up the good work on the blog!
Sorry Ray, must have missed your comment. Just approved it.
We’ve yet to use Amazon api and will be looking into it in the future. At the moment, we’re using Easycontentunits for some sites where Amazon products are listed or we just manually update as and when but agree prices are constantly changing.
Another way of updating prices could be to scrape them, but not got any experience in that. Best bit is it figure out the API stuff.
Thanks for following us.
Gary