Why Amazon's affiliate program is not worth the trouble
Why Amazon's affiliate program is not worth the trouble
Selling books online for referral commissions is a useful way to
supplement the income form any site, but watch out for the big
shark.
Amazon is the world's largest bookstore and a pioneer of many
features and techniques which have contributed to the
development of e-commerce. Well, they're not just a bookstore
anymore they sell just about every consumer product you could
care to buy online. They were certainly among the first to use
affiliate marketing, or associates as Amazon call their
affiliate program.
Before we look at the big flaw in the Amazon associates program
lets just look at what are Amazon.com's major virtues. Their
search system and enhancements are first class. Once you find an
item you can find suggestions for similar items in dozens of
ways.
Amazon has cleverly incorporated the behaviour and expressed
opinions of its huge customer base into enhancements to enable
customers to be exposed to similar items. It does this by
customer reviews, customer lists of favourites, customer how to
guides and lists of items bought by customers who also bought
the item you are looking at. Search inside is a All of this adds
up to better service to the customer, and of course, more sales
for Amazon.
Amazon's A9.com search engine is an outstanding resource with
unique featues which are invaluable to all manner of web
research.
But let's look at the associates program. The deal is you can
use a website or other means to refer potential customers to
Amazon. Depending on how you set up your links the customer is
referred to a particular item, a group of items in a particular
category or the site as a whole. There are plenty of ways to
customise this.
If the referred customer buys the item, then the referrer
(associate) gets a small commission (5%-7.5%) If the customer
orders buys within 24hrs, then the commission is paid, otherwise
the referrer gets nothing.
The problem with this arrangement is that the associate gets
very little reward for his or her effort. Many people do not buy
items on their first visit. Because the Amazon name is already
so well known many customers will go straight back to Amazon to
find the item, and the sale will not be credited to the referrer.
So all of the work of the referrer in pre-selling the item is
wasted, at least for the associate. Amazon, on the other hand,
gets another customer, probably long term. I'm not sure what
proportion of Amazon's sales are return sales from existing
customers.
The first sale is the hardest to achieve, once a customer has
broken the ice they will keep coming back for more. This is
especially true of books, we are never satisfied with just one
book, whereas there is a limit to how many TV's or digital
cameras we may buy.
I believe Amazon is being very short-sighted in its associates
program. Associates could be rewarding associates who deliver
them customers, rather than sales. they could do this by
extending the life of the cookie, by giving some credit for
subsequent sales, and by giving associates some sort of credit
for introducing new clients to Amazon.
The guys who are running the show at Amazon are smart enough to
devise a better scheme and do all the technical stuff to make
sure it is tracked. They just have a blind spot when it comes to
adequately rewarding associates. they need a new paradigm,
associates are giving them customers, not just sales.
My advice is to use Amazon with caution, you may be better
served by putting Google ads on your site and picking up a few
cents per sale, rather than trying to sell through Amazon and
seeing the commissions slip through your fingers.
If you really want to sell books there is a much better program
available, with higher commissions, and lifetime cookies. You
can get 10% commission on the book you promote and 10% on all
subsequent purchases by that customer whenever he or she
returns, be it next day, next week or next year. You can find
out about it at http://www.ozarticles.com/smart-bookselling.html