Amazon Changes referral rates

[Chris]

They didn't change much for Q2 2006, but they did do this:



New rate on consumer electronics -- Associates will now earn a flat 4% on consumer electronics items, regardless of unit volume. While keeping the new rate competitive, this decision was necessary to maintain a healthy Associates program over the long-term.

No more 10% on big screen TVs :(

[Emancipator]

totally un-impressed with amazon. I sent over 5,000 clicks for a dvd I was promoting and 0 purchased it. It was a big name blockbuster as well. I am not getting as involved with amazon anymore.

[s2kinteg916]

u are probally better off promoting like netflix... emanc..

[Emancipator]

yeah i think amazon has a bug in their system.... ive never ever seen such a brutal return. Normally its 5%.

[chromate]

No more 10% on big screen TVs :(

Yep. I was wondering how much longer that kind of thing would last. I made a good amount of money by selling xbox360s and PSP's around Christmas time through amazon via PPC. At the time in the UK they were offering the highest commissions by far of anyone selling these consoles. No chance of that kind of thing now.

[Chris]

its the low cookie time.

[cameron]

Over the past few months I've removed all Amazon ads from my sites. Even with $20 commissions on some items, I've found that I make way more sending those clicks to adsense. My amazon ads were working out to about $0.002 per click.

[Erin]

Yeah, I got the email today, but I'm not too worried. Amazon operates on a razor-thin profit margin. Offering 10% off big ticket items is quite a lot.

[Emancipator]

cameron I am with you 100%

[Blue Cat Buxton]

Amazon must feel that the change is justified, which suggests that someone must be making money from electrical goods. (not me unfortunately though)

There has been a £7 cap from amazon.co.uk since before Christmas on electronic goods.

[5starAffiliates]

I did a long blog about it today. Too many links and quotes to convert to BBcode. Hope it's OK to post just the 1st paragraph and link. My carpal can't handle much more today.

Amazon Changes Commission - Associates Threatening to Drop Links
"Amazon just announced it's Associates Q2 2006 Compensation plan and affiliates are up in arms about the pay cut calling it a De-incentive and many threatening to remove links. In addition to viewing the changes as a pay cut, many affiliates are upset about the fact that they were notified only two days in advance of the changes by an an email that said ‘earn more all the time’ and contained other messaging they felt was spin and insulted their intelligence."

The rest:
http://affiliate-blogs.5staraffiliateprograms.com/2006/03/30/amazon-associates-commission/

[Jon]

I'd just like to chime in and say that Amazon blows as an affiliate program. Their low commissions make me want to throw something at them, and the fact that their cookies are always overridden by spyware pisses me off even more. Even though I still buy things there, I would never join their affiliate program unless they pay me for sales up front. And even then, they'd have to change their cookie situation. Screw them! Use something like Pricegrabber or Shopping.com as a PPC affiliate instead, you'd probably make more from people that are "just browsing" anyhow.

[Emancipator]

Jon I am gonna check out those... thanks.. For the 18,000 people i sent to Amazon to have 0 buy is just complete horse ****. I can tell you a year ago I was sending alot less and maintaining my 5% conversion. At times 13%. Need to get me a dvd affiliate that doesnt screw around!

[Cutter]

When I first started web publishing, I was building an Amazon affiliate site. I took a closer look at the numbers and killed the project, it just didn't make sense.

May be this is a bad example, but at a 5% commision rate you have to send them a million dollars in sales just to make $50,000. Seems to me its a lot more worth while to spend your time working at bringing in a million dollars in sales for an affiliate that can pay you more money than that.

As a retail site, Amazon is great. I always buy my books from them. As a place to send traffic, its just not worthwhile.

I wonder about those electronics items, some products at 10% is definately losing money, but I know high-def TVs get a huge markup in retail stores. But I can't say I know how Amazon compares on these prices.

Another thing I'm curious about.. what about all the new & used products from other retailers selling through Amazon? Are you getting paid commisions through these guys? When I shop there 50% of the time, thats where I buy the book/product I'm searching for; it could explain the horrendous conversions.

[Nintendo]

Bah!! I've been trying to tell you all for two years that AWS is dead. NOW do you all believe me!!!

Da king of da wacko was right...again!!!! :D:D:D:D

[James]

Again? When was the first time?

[Emancipator]

Nintendo sorry bud when you said it was dead it was not. My complaint is not that I am not getting amazon clicks, its that I am not getting any sales from the thousands of clicks. So amazon is performing just fine, I just dont get any moolah from it.

But you are still da wacko king :P

[James]

Your site is performing fine; I think the clickthroughs vs. sales is pointing to Amazon being the bad performer.

[Emancipator]

exactly james :) Hence I am going to try and go a different route.

[5starAffiliates]

Your high clicks and NO money just shows the importance of having long cookies. You are sending the visitor but if they buy a day later you lose out. :rage:

I'm a big believer in long cookies ESPECIALLY for products like electronics that sometimes have a long buy cycles. All our programs have long cookies.

[Emancipator]

Just a little note here Im not selling electronics. Amazon is the only one that has a truly comprehensive movie program that I have seen.

[KLB]

I started dumping Amazon ads two or three years ago. They just weren't worth the hassle. I now only using them as a third or forth teer advertier to if I can't get other ads for a key position.

The thing that upsets me the most about them is their lack of care about spyware stealing affiliate revenue. Amazon does very little to protect their legitimate affiliates from having their Amazon ads hijacked.

[ramprage]

I don't see the justice in taking the time to make a site for a lousy 4%. They better increase their comissions or affiliate partners will find a new place to sign up.

[James]

4% isn't a terrible rate; their old rates used to be quite high, and you know that visitors are more likely to buy from a site they've heard of before, such as Amazon.
Personally, I'm disappointed, but I'm not going to start using someone else.

[KelliShaver]

I'm running a little experiment. The commissionsn from Amazon are horrible, but I'm trying something different. I'm using their data feeds via ECS to build a directory-type content site. I have a "buy it on Amazon" link on the end pages, just so they don't question my use of the service, but I really expect that any income from the site will be through ads.

I created a directory of books in a specific genre in which users can locate books by author and read descriptions of them. I'm doing a little automatic rewriting of some of the text descriptions coming from Amazon to solve any duplicate content issues. I gave everything SE-friendly URL's and cached (updating every 21 days on demand) a lot of the data to cut down on calls to Amazon/speed up load times.

I stuck on a google/yahoo sitemap generator and submitted it to a few places and it has some incoming links from some high PR sites.

It's way too early to tell if it will have any kind of success in the search engines or not, but I've had AWS sites rank well in the past. Ads are targeting very nicely.

It will be interesting to see how it goes in a few months. If it doesn't pan out, I'm only out $8 and a few hours of my time.

[Emancipator]

i didnt build a site for amazon. I integrated it into my site database. This time last year it was WELL worth it. I am now phasing it out of my site. The thousands has turned into 0. And the click throughs have gone up, not down for me. James is bang on right.

[Emancipator]

Wow is there alot of hatred on the amazon discussion boards over this topic. I know i am still looking for an amazon replacement. The fact that amazon made an over 20% jump in profits has really pissed off ALOT of affiliates http://www.hoovers.com/amazon.com,-inc./--ID__51493--/free-co-factsheet.xhtml Nothing like thanking your affiliates with a cut.

I will definitely be interested in seeing where that number is in a year. This is a great opportunity for an amazon competitor to jump into the market and steal alot of angry affiliates who feel royally screwed.

[James]

Well, hell. If they'll offer a service better than Amazon, then I'd jump on board as well, and this hasn't even been an issue for me, really.