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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The Amazon Affiliate Program, also known as their Associate Program is an affiliate marketing program that rewards bloggers or publishers websites up to 10% for click throughs that result in a purchase.

The program is very simple to use and offers links, banners, product images, widgets and even your own Astore.

Amazon is a trusted brand and I suspect almost every household will purchase or will have already purchased something from Amazon at somepoint in their lifetime.

Amazon is so successfull and provides very competitive prices for almost any product you can think of. This is a major benefit of using Amazon’s Affiliate Program.

Because Amazon is a trusted brand, their reputation helps promote the products on your site.

Amazon runs its own program rather than through a affiliate network. Amazon will handle all customer service, delivery and tracking of sales generated via a cookie, however I think the cookie only last 24hours.

On the plus side, if you refer someone to Amazon and they purchase something else un-related, then you may earn commission for referring that customer. It’s not uncommon for people to browse and buy other products from Amazon.

There is 2 separate commission programs to choose from. The first being Classic free structure, 4% commission of all qualifying products sold from referrals

The second being Performance free structure, earn from 5 – 10% depending on how many units you sell but has some limits.

The choice of which program will depend on the product you are intended to promote. For example a book that only costs £10-15 at 5% commission is not going to mount up to much so the second program may work best. Now if you choose to promote a larger item, then your commission would be higher and you would probably want to consider the first program because you may not sell as many units and also the limits on your referral fee might not be as good. My tip would be to take some time to figure out how many units you expect to sell and the average commission you expect to get from those referrals.

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