Amazon and you today

AMAZON SLASHING COMMISSIONS BUT WHY?

Amazon is slashing commission rates across various categories. The changes are quite significant in some cases: The furniture and home improvement category’s affiliate cut fell from 8 percent to 3 percent, for instance, while grocery items’ commission rate is now down to 1 percent from 5 percent.

THIS TABLE REPRESENTS THE NEW FEE STRUCTURE AS OF APRIL 21, 2020.

Product Category

Changed Fixed Standard Program Fee Rates

Furniture, Home, Home Improvement, Lawn & Garden, Pets Products, Pantry

3.00%

Headphones, Beauty, Musical Instruments, Business & Industrial Supplies

3.00%

Outdoors, Tools

3.00%

Grocery

1.00%

Sports

3.00%

Baby Products

3.00%

Health & Personal Care

1.00%

Amazon Fresh

1.00%

Amazon stated that it had to hire 100,000 warehouse and delivery workers to keep up with demand, now this does not sound like an ailing company to me. It sounds like quite the opposite, sounds like they have booming sales which to me would be an increase in profits. They didn’t say anything about how many office workers they laid off, especially customer support which used to be just about a 24/7 response team. I know this because I have been a premium customer for over two years and had to contact them on many occasions.

The net sales for Amazon in the last quarter’s year ending 2019 leading into 2020 clearly demonstrated a growth of 21%. I am quite certain anyone of us in WA would love a growth rate of our websites of 21% net, so to me the only explanation for this severe cut in commission rates is pure greed. I’m not making this accusation on supposition, by no means, I am making this accusation on the facts I have given you here, one demonstrating the severe cuts the other demonstrating that Amazon is having unprecedented growth which brings unprecedented profits.

Why bite the hand that feeds you? It’s simply because they are in a power position to dictate, control and force their unfair practices upon the affiliates who have helped them get to where they are. Clearly when you are making a 21% profit and I mean profit because that is a net figure not a gross figure what is your complaint.

I recently purchased what was called an atomic clock from Amazon, it was to go on my bedroom wall. This type of clock took three small batteries in total and was to operate for several years on them, in addition to that it’s set itself off the time in Colorado so you never had to adjust it. Well the prime delivery driver came to my apartment complex and instead of delivering it to my door he handed it to a neighbor, this was stated in the delivery documentation.Needless to say I never got the clock, this happened on April 8th and I found out about it on April 14th. I tried contacting them by phone but to no avail there is nobody to answer the phones and this you get my message, so I tried an email 24 hours ago and so far no response. My only recourse it seems will be to contact my bank and have them reverse the charges. The point being even the consumer is losing while Amazon is making record profits once again demonstrating greed.

I have an update to this story, I was checking my Amazon orders and deliveries I still have some things to come well I once again looked at that clock order and low and behold the comment was changed to say from handing it to a neighbor it now says he handed it to a resident. Yes they have updated it and altered the original information, I only wished I had printed it but alas I did not. So now we know they will even lie on their documentation, add another low to Amazon, shame shame Amazon shame shame.

4

I strongly suggest we start to pass the word among WA members to do their best to back off Amazon, to begin finding other affiliates. I honestly believe that if we can get enough WA support we can cause a dent in their sales, a sort of WA protest. After all Amazon does not listen and will not listen unless their sales are directly affected, it’s an old saying BS walks and money talks. So please begin to pass the word between your WA friends and followers, I will be lucky if 10 people read this blog, but if those 10 talk to just two or three others and those others do the same it will grow exponentially. The bottom line is we work hard for our commissions, between searching for the proper keywords, writing the posts, pinterests and all the other advertisement we tried to work for we do a lot to bring in the consumer to eventually point him/her in the right direction. Do we want to point them to Amazon? Where they will not receive decent customer service, which will directly affect how they feel about returning to our websites after all we sent them there. We have some very important decisions to make here let’s make the right ones, they will affect our websites for a long time to come, is a small commission check worth the loss of a disgruntled customer because of the rotten service by Amazon think it over, I already have.

Joe