Amazon cutting commissions - is this the end of Amazon affiliates?

Tools of the trade Affiliate & CPA
#1

If you’re using Amazon as you affiliate provider you might have received the notice that starting 21st of April they will be lowering commissions by a lot. Many perceive this to be a dick move and they do seem to make it harder for affiliates every couple of years.

Here’s what the new rates will be :

amazon affiliate rates lowered
amazon affiliate rates lowered709×468 69.4 KB

Those 1% really look like a fuck you if you ask me… but who knows, others may see it differently.

So, how do you guys stand? Is anyone around here doing affiliate marketing and how do you guys think this will influence the market.

As for me, I’d really love to see them get a kick in the balls even though I don’t have any deals with them. After all there are a lot of marketers who have decent to very good sites and get all the traffic. If all of them change their links towards some other site offering better commissions they will lose a lot of good traffic.

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#2

I saw it other day, but as always, marketers find the solution :slight_smile: and this time it’s dropshipping from Amazon. Shortly explained:

  • Get domain
  • Get Shopify and dropshipping plugin, set up store
  • Import Amazon products and raise prices for 10-15%
  • Redirect all your affiliate links from your other websites to appropriate products in your shop.
  • Profit more than you did before.

I understand visitors have more trust buying from Amazon directly and conversion rate will probably be lower, but higher % should make up for it.

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#3

haha, yeah, that’s a good one :smiley:

anyone else with other good ideas to circumvent this?

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#4

I believe @HenryCooper will chime in.

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#5

This is the end… no doubt, we need to come up with a new model, Amazon will shut down the program sooner than later, they don’t need anymore the traffic from the affiliates.

We have customers that are in panic, we explained them some possible solutions but for many won’t be doable. What @Adnan said makes sense but I don’t see it as the natural way for most of the guys doing amazon affiliate now.

What’s not dead is affiliates programs in general, but, expect more companies to follow Amazon path, and a few going on the other direction, on those we need to focus the energy now.

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#6

yes, they might actually do this.

how about something like adsense? no need to actually target exact products with affiliate sites so people have more room to choose from.

why do you expect this? affiliates is, after all a proven and working method of acquiring clients.

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#7

So this is why I see more Amazon affiliate websites being put on sale on a local forum.
Their website earning will decrease by much.

#8

Yeah, probably, they’re trying last minute to find someone that doesn’t know what’s going on. Flippa has a lot of those as well, with pretty high prices, like 2-3 years of earning, good luck with that to anyone trying this now :smiley:

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#9

could only work for people with very low earnings from Amazon, think that if your products were expensive, your commision was very juicy, no way that with adsense you will get close to it.

Then you will need a rethink your SEO strategies as well. This move is a game changer.

#10

I expect to waves of actions here, the ones nearer to Amazon will do the same, talking about companies with huge customer base, and others will try to atract afiliates to drive traffic, the problem they will have is nobody today has the inventory of Amazon and the reputation. So at a big escale there aren’t other players, my move would be to play local and to go into super small niches where you can find sellers willing to pay interesting commissions for traffic.
(Basically going back to square 1 like 10 years ago)

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