Commission Caps – How Much I Earned for a £1,015 Sale
Commission Caps can be annoying. They aren’t really very common in affiliate marketing but with Amazon they can fairly often cut into your profits.
Here you can see a few of the items I’ve sold on Amazon. The most expensive sale I referred brought in £1015 for Amazon. Even at Amazon’s lowest commission rate, without the cap, this would have earned me over £50. Instead I got just £7. I earned barely over 0.5% of the sale price for my part in bringing a high paying customer to their site.
A few of my sales which had their commissions capped. The cap just for these items cost me over £100. I bet Amazon don't cap the commission they charge on third party sales.
It’s pretty annoying but then Amazon can be fairly generous in some ways. For example Play.com pay just 2% commission on DVDs while Amazon gives a minimum of 5% up to 9% (but realistically very few affiliates will get above 6.5%). So Amazon is paying far more than double what other companies will pay for certain items. On the downside Amazon‘s one day cookie is another annoyance.
What do you think about Amazon’s affiliate rates, one day cookies and commission caps? What caps have stopped you earning what you should have?
Totally agree with your comments about Amazon. I didn’t even know about the changes they brought into place, otherwise I probably would have changed to to the Classic plan. Nice website btw.
Thanks
. I have plenty more to say on the subject of Amazon new rates. I’ll add that to my “to write about” list.
OK, I’m confused as I haven’t really been doing many Amazon sales for a while. I was on a structure like you above, where I could only get a maximum of £7 per sale. I switched from that on to a normal percentage based model but I’ve just looked at the T&Cs again and the model I’m on pays 4% whereas the ‘Performance Model’ pays from 5% upwards! I would have assumed this was the one I switched from. Does the ‘Performance’ plan have a cap? Why have two plans if they aren’t capped, with one paying 4% and the other a minimum of 5%? I’m confused!
Having two commission structures is confusing and I think the only reason they do it is because it’s more fun. They work like this:
Performance – 5%-10% commission with a £7 cap on certain goods.
Classic – 4% commission with no cap on anything.