Amazon Slashes Commission Rates – Again – Because They Can

If your site only contains Amazon affiliate links, you are probably in big trouble.

Amazon announced huge commission cuts, effective April 21st. Here are the cuts:

• Furniture, Home, Home Improvement, Lawn & Garden, Pets Products, Pantry – was 8%, now 3%
• Headphones, Beauty, Musical Instruments, Business & Industrial Supplies – was 6%, now 3%
• Outdoors, Tools – was 5.5%, now 3%
• Grocery – was 5%, now 1%
• Sports – was 4.5%, now 3%
• Baby products – was 4.5%, now 3%
• Health and Personal Care – was 4.5%, now 1%
• Amazon Fresh – was 3%, now 1%

Cuts this deep wipe out the reasons to work with Amazon. Using them because it’s so “easy” will cost you a fortune. So what if “they sell everything” – if you may only make a 1% commission if someone buys through your link.

Consider working with the affiliate programs offered through affiliate networks. Not only are the cookies normally much longer than Amazon’s 1-day cookie, but now their commission rates are significantly higher.

I’ll give you odds that the commission from other programs will always be better than what Amazon will now be paying. And remember, Amazon did this because they could, not because they had to. They will still be reporting record profits. Just shows what they think of their affiliates.

Both Awin.com and ShareASale.com have bookmarklet tools which make it just as easy to pull a deeplink to a product.

Since I work for both of those networks, I’ll be glad to recommend merchants to use instead of Amazon for your specific products. Right now I only have about 100 of the ShareASale programs entered into the Affiliate Programs tab, but ShareASale has over 6,000 merchants, so I can find one for just about anything you need. Just let me know what you need.

Time to switch to merchants who actually appreciate having you as their affiliate!