Introduction to Affiliate Marketing
Amazon has shown time and time again that they have the power in the affiliate and merchant relationship. However, if your site has meaningful traffic, you should be able to negotiate some high-paying affiliate deals that will outperform Amazon.
The History of Amazon’s Affiliate Program
Amazon first "simplified" affiliate commissions in 2017, which resulted in commission reductions across the board. Most recently, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, they decimated commissions as much as -62.5% in some of their categories. Despite these changes, affiliates and influencers continue to work with Amazon, and the company remains a dominant force in the affiliate marketing space.
The Bad News
The bad news is that there isn’t really a way to completely break up with Amazon. They’re an incredible filler affiliate program that you can send spare traffic to. While Amazon’s commission rates are pretty terrible, their conversion rate is incredible. On top of that, they give you a cut of the entire cart, regardless if it’s the same product or even category that you advertised.
The Good News
The good news is that most of the time you’ll be able to swap out your Amazon links to somewhere else. There are two main scenarios you’ll encounter when trying to do this: the product doesn’t have an affiliate program, and you’ll need to set up a deal, or the product already has an affiliate program.
Setting Up Deals
If the product has no affiliate program, you’ll need to get creative. Start out with your highest traffic pages or the products you see yourself selling the most on Amazon. This gives you the most leverage and credibility when approaching brands and stores. You can view which products you sell the most of by going to your Amazon Associates home page and navigating to your reports.
Working with Amazon
Ideally, with this setup, at the end of an agreed-upon time period, you count up their product sales, and invoice them at an agreed-upon rate. This allows you to double dip on commissions and still have Amazon’s incredible conversion rate. There’s plenty of upside for them to process orders through Amazon. They earn precious feedback and other engagement signals that Amazon’s algorithm uses.
Finding Affiliate Programs
Some alternative affiliate programs will be readily available with just a little bit of searching. Others will require you to do some outreach. Similar to the above example, it’s best to start with what’s already selling well by checking your sales history on Amazon. Of your top-selling products, locate their website and see if they have a readily available affiliate program.
Negotiating Affiliate Commissions
Negotiating commissions is made 100x easier if you have traffic. That being said, no matter how much traffic you have, Amazon will not negotiate with you. Our only option is to negotiate with Amazon competitors. Here’s an email I sent recently to a competing affiliate program: explaining that you have traffic and that if they don’t work with you, you will not change your links.
Conclusion
For all the products and brands that refuse to work with you, or are too lazy to set up their own affiliate program, you’ll have no other option but to send your traffic Jeff Bezos’s way. Whether we like it or not, Amazon is here to stay no matter how many times they cut our affiliate commissions. However, any site with meaningful traffic should be able to negotiate some high-paying affiliate deals that will outperform Amazon. Once you’ve put these deals in place, you’ll want to promote these offers like crazy by giving them prime placement in your content. So you can ditch Amazon (kinda), and increase your site’s earnings, one day leading to a larger sale.