Forum Moderators: skibum
We had a meeting last week and decided to stop doing our individual book links to amazon as they are now cost ineffective. With individual links you get 15% commission, not 5%. But the times that we actually get that 15% has reduced to a trickle.
The trick is that Amazon only pays when people immediately put the book in their basket, before going to any other pages. A referred customer may still buy the book you recommended, but you only get 5% if they do something before - (like do another search, go to their amazon recommendations, etc etc.)
The "landing page" now has so many distractions that people do not WANT to click and buy straight away. The buy button is getting less obvious every update. On the first screen of info there is a big advert saying "buy the book you want PLUS this other one for a special price" (Of course you dont get 15% if they do that). There are numerous columns and blocks or "related books", recommendations, lists etc, that it almost seems that Amazon is trying to DISCOURAGE the visitor from buying the book the site referrer recommended. I think they have a great site, bye the way, the way they have personalised it and provide all matter of info and interactive facilities is great. But for the visitor more so than the affiliate!
Now the new announcement (with great fanfare on the associates page) from amazon is that they are "increasing" commissions according to performance. If we sell 25 books a quarter we now get 5.5% and i think if we sell 50 (or is it a hundred?) we get 6%.
Gee.. thanks amazon. That means my averahe commission on our average $20 book has gone up from $1 to $1.10...
Its just starting to sound a bit like spin, with the fast decrease in our 15%'s over the past few years..
Maybe Amazon has now got the brand recognition they want, so they dont need exposure and referrals from other sites so much now and are just doing enough to keep ahead of potential competitors.
In the meantime we are canning our specially selected and custom book recommendations and putting up their auto js keyword driven box. It only gets us 5%, but then again so does 96% of our carefully thought out book recommendation links, and we can put it there and forget it and not anything brain-straining. (And we wont run foul of Google thinking we are an affiliate site with several amazon links spread throughout!)
Not complaining. Amazon has to do what is best for their shareholders, but just wondering whether enyone was having success with these individual 15% links now? and how?
We have highly specialised news type sites by the way, and a bookish intellectual audience, usually experienced international managers usually with university education so if amazon should work anywhere, it should work with ours.
Any comments?
This may be hard to quatify as a quess, and greatly depends on the quality and quantity of your content linking. I suppose if the linking content matched your website content, and was integrated well you would do fairly well with the traffic.
I'm sure others could give you a better estimate, but I would say at least around $200-$400 a month. 500K impressions, integration linking on content pages...at least that amount.
$200 - $500 a month ! :(
I was expecting that figure with another 0 on the end!
Wasn't there some speculation that Amazon had dropped Morpheus/Buyersport as an affiliate?
Not speculation. It has happened. They're also dropping eBates as of October 1.
Problem is that Morpheus still re-writes the URL in an attempt to get credit for the sale, now nobody gets credit.
It's a step in the right direction.
PS, I also found out this morning that they dropped WhenU, citing Operating Agreement violations. Oh happy day. Education is the key. :)
I could not agree more.
:)
A google dance, and now this news. What more could a guy ask for in one day.
