Is the Amazon Affiliate Program Worth It for Websites in 2023?
Should you use the Amazon Affiliate Program? Is it still worth it for websites in 2023? In today's video, we're going to be answering that question based off my past experiences running it on a number of different niche websites as well as taking a look at what the commissions are today.
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0:00 - Introduction to Is the Amazon Affiliate Program Worth It for Websites in 2022?
0:26 - Is it worth it to be part of the Amazon Affiliate Program?
The quick answer from me is that overall it is worth it to be a part of the Amazon affiliate program. That said, it does depend and you do want to make sure that you don't rely on it too much.
0:37 - Amazon Affiliate Program rates today
What you can tell on my screen is that Amazon games are clearly what Amazon is pushing today with 20% fixed income commissions for each of the referrals of purchases around Amazon games.
Amazon is also emphasizing things around luxury beauty, luxury stores, Amazon explore, digital music, physical books, and things like that.
But as you work your way further down the list, you're going to see a list of some of the things that they aren't really giving as much of commissions for.
So you can see that they're giving things for television and digital video games, Amazon fresh, gift cards and all other categories are just a standard 4%.
2:12 - Amazon Bounty Program
Amazon Affiliate also includes a variety of different bounty categories for key things that they are pushing on their platform.
For example, when you get people to sign up for their first Amazon video free trial, you earn a flat $2 and 50 cent bounty. Same thing goes in terms of a $3 bounty for Amazon baby registry and things like that.
3:32 - Digging into one of my websites
I'll show you the stats for 2020, and then show you it compared to 2021 just so you can tell how big of a difference it has been in terms of being in a category where Amazon changed the affiliate commission rates overnight.
So in this particular example in 2020, this website was making about 5.5K in Amazon affiliate commissions, and yet when we compare it to the next year, this number has pretty much dropped in half to about 3.2K at the time of this recording.
In the year 2020, I gave Amazon about 109,000 clicks from this website versus in 2021, I was giving around 82,000 clicks.
Yes, my conversion rate has gone down from 5.15% to about 4.3%, but the order of magnitude difference in the clicks from 2020 to 2021 are not equal to the magnitude of the change in my affiliate commissions.
5:06 - Comparing commissions
I've got a website here in which in 2020, it made about $205 and then in the year 2021, it's made about $666.
When we start comparing the commissions we have about 4,200 clicks in 2020 versus in 2021, I've actually had around 28,000 clicks.
So clearly what you can tell here is I sent a lot more clicks on the second site at the same time. The thing that's different about this particular site versus the first example is that the first site really only launched after Amazon had already made their affiliate commission changes whereas the first site was already existing and doing well on Amazon affiliates before the commission change of 2020.
6:17 - Key Takeaways:
If you're thinking about starting to use Amazon affiliates, I say, go ahead and do it.
If you can't find another affiliate program that has a better rate for you, there are a lot of great alternatives out there such as impact marketing as well as other websites where you can sign up for different affiliate programs,
Taking a step back though, and thinking about it in the context of your overall business, I would not rely on Amazon affiliate commissions for your primary revenue stream.
✍️ COMMENT BELOW:
Are you using the Amazon Affiliate Program? Is it still worth your time?
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Disclaimer: Grow with Will does not provide tax, legal, or accounting advice. This video, and the ideas presented in it, are for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for, tax, legal or accounting advice.