Amazon Affiliate Commission Changes: How You Are Impacted And What You Can Do

Really big Amazon affiliate commission changes a few weeks ago may have a dramatic impact on your paychecks coming from the big online retailer. Learn all about what changed, why I think Amazon is making the change, and what you can to if you are impacted.

Show Notes

Do I still recommend as a place to start if you are an affiliate marketer?

Yes, I absolutely do. It’s still a great way to start and to learn affiliate marketing. I would probably just recommend that you stay away from things that have incredibly low commissions – but we have always discussed that you should promote things that give you a decent commission. It means that some niches that you may have considered before may no longer be economically or commercially viable niche.

Why did Amazon do this and anger affiliates?

There are more than 3100 products affected in this tier and in my understanding, Amazon phone all those affected directly. The answer is always because this will make Amazon more money. Amazon is in the business of making money and not in the business of creating great affiliate programs. For televisions, for example, the competition is fierce and the margins are already super low and they cannot afford to lose more money. For those which they raised the commissions, they have the room to do so, so they are trying to compensate with that, or they are trying to drive behavior to sell as many high-margined products as much as possible.

If you are affected, what do you do?

Look and see if there are other affiliate programs that you can use in place of Amazon if you have been hit particularly hard to see if you can get back to your original commission level. There are also other places like Commission Junction where you might share a sale. You might find a retailer there who happens to sell TVs, for example, who are offering higher commissions than 2%.

Lesson: Change is always constant in this business. Use Pretty Link because if something happens to your affiliate relationship with some supplier, then you can change suppliers without having to edit 40k pages in your website. It makes it easy to maintain your website.

In the episode, I mention the new Associates commission structure. You can find this information on the Amazon site here, but I have reproduced the relevant graphic below. As you can see, by Amazon standards, furniture and home goods pay pretty well at 10%.

Links Mentioned In This Episode

100K Factory program
Copywriting Academy Videos
Amazon Associates Fee Structure
The Alamo
What is Affiliate Marketing
How to calculate your affiliate earning potential

Want More Late Night Internet Marketing?

Help Me Help You

The more I hear from you about your struggles, trials and tribulations, the more I can help. So, be sure to leave comments on this post to reach out to me on Twitter @LateNightIM or on the LateNightIM Facebook Fan Page.

I’d love to hear what you think about the podcast. Better yet, Id love to answer your question about Internet marketing on the show. Just drop me a line here on the blog or on the digital recorder at 214-444-8655. Dont worry, there are no stupid questions. Unless you tell me not to, when you ask a question or leave a comment might even use it on the show.

Help Me Help Others

Thanks so much for your reviews on iTunes. We get a ton of exposure from iTunes, and we really appreciate the reviews there. At last count, we were over 100 reviews worldwide and counting. Reviews help us get new listeners — so I really appreciate you taking the time to leave a review. To leave a review, just go to latenightim.com/itunes and follow the instructions. Thanks!

Amazon Affiliate Commission Changes Episode Transcript

I hope you’re having an absolutely fantastic day. Things are going great here in Dallas, Texas. I’ve been incredibly busy doing a lot of stuff.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been investigating this program that has been going on for a couple of years now called 100K Factory. I wanted to talk to you about that again. I mentioned it last week and I mentioned that for those of you who happened to join, if you wanted to join through my affiliate link we could go through it together. I’m going to go through it and learn about it and I’ll tell you why I’m doing that in a minute. If you want to go check that out before it closes in a couple of days you can do that at LateNightIM.com/100k.

What makes this interesting is that it’s a different business model from what we usually talk about here on Late Night Internet Marketing, which is one of the things that make the internet sort of amazing. You can sell information products on the internet, you can do affiliate marketing of all kinds of other products, including information products and physical products, you can have a services business, you can do consulting or speaking and make money on the internet, you can sell software as a service. There’s just no end to the kinds of things you can do to generate income on the internet.

(Episode 130 Transcript Continued…)