Amazon Cutting Commissions on April 21st

Chris Kirksey said:
Can also look at it this way - if the affiliate community as a whole no longer puts as much effort into Amazon, the sellers on Amazon will (hopefully) be making less sales, then looking for alternative ways to up their product sales such as cj and shareasale. If that happens (will likely take a good amount of time until it does), our commissions will turn out to be higher at the end of the day :)
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Chinese sellers will never go to CJ or ShareAsale. 90% of the products at amazon are pump n dump.
 
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Lol amazon that company is trying to control the whole online market. I never user amazon affiliate at any of my websites.
 
First of all, being an affiliate partner is the worst and most insecure business type. I remember this company when they were selling books only. Affiliate partners didn't deserve this, after all they did in many years for this company. But, if you can drive traffic to Amazon, you can send it to other sites too. Try to contact product suppliers and maybe you can make a better deal. I believe some suppliers would love to sell directly on their shops and avoid amazon fees. This won't work for everyone, and you can't expect to earn from all kinds of products but if you are specialized in some niche I think it can be good for you. I wouldn't send traffic to amazon for 1% f... that
 
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2020 has been a catastrophic year for me.
I am mainly on the travel niche so it is down to zero because fo all the travel bans.
I do some Amazon affiliate marketing but mainly for luggages which is trashed too.
I also have another Amazon affiliate website about garden and tools which has triple traffic because of the virus so it is giving me a very little income during that crisis. This is the only consolation I got.
And then I saw those commission rates dropping like crazy in the USA.
I am in Europe but I know those changes will come soon for sure. I can only prepare for the worst case scenario.

At least I can expect to partly recover next year because the competition is still fierce in the travel niche. I managed to negociate better deals before the crisis which is something very hard to do for physical products.

We have to be realistic guys. Amazon is way too powerful now. We helped creating a monster which is near a private monopoly for ecommerce.
Almost all American people can order on Amazon with a Prime account which is an absolute game changer. People look for informations on the internet and then buy on Amazon because it is so convenient with their Prime account. This is why the conversion rate is really good on Amazon and impossible to achieve with other affiliate programs. Amazon killed the competition and now they don't fear competitors so they can rise theirs margin by cutting by half commission rates. They could withdraw the program, it wouldn't make a big change for them as long as people keep their Prime account.

I've been watching most Youtubers to see what alternatives they are suggesting for the US market. It looks really bad for physical products to be honest. We still have to see someone who is killing it with Wallmart affiliate program. I don't see many people doing great outside the infoproducts or software world which is quite saturated.
I wished there were more direct affiliate programs with big brands so it would cut the middleman which is now taking most of the margin. That is something we have to build for the future : skip the middleman as much as you can.

Anyway, we saw something bad coming already. Amazon was already closing some successful accounts with almost no reason and no explanation. We are already too dependent on Google. Being too dependent on Amazon on top of that is suicidal.
They just showed they could cut affiliate revenues by half and whishing us the best during that crisis in the same email. This is an unhuman behaviour whereas Bezos is the richest guy in the world. I can't do much about it on my personal level, but at least, I decided not renewing my Prime account as a consumer and I now prioritize other alternatives as much as possible as an affiliate marketer. I have a few better options in Europe comparing to the USA as Amazon hasn't killed all kind of competition yet. But it is better to act as soon as possible and support competitors.

We should think long term even though Amazon might be more profitable for some in the short term because of the high conversion rate. They can put many online businesses down to zero in a day if they decide to withdraw the program.
It is very healthy to promote competitors, brands, or small ecommerces. It might be a long way to go obviously. But if many affiliate marketers switch to other programs, it could be another game changer as online marketers are some of the smartest people in the world.

I can only see promoting Amazon in a price comparison tool from now. For me, the golden age of Made For Amazon websites is completly over.
 
Guys its not a permanent decision they made, we can see huge improvement of sales in categories which they dropped the commission rate these days,

If they are going keep this commission rate in further as well, they will loosing good links and seo power which comes from affliate sites, amazon keep their top ranking for every category with support from network of affliate sites , dont think they want to see less brand visibility in serps, im pretty sure they are more analytical than saving few dollars by rereducing the rate
 
samrox said:
Guys its not a permanent decision they made, we can see huge improvement of sales in categories which they dropped the commission rate these days,

If they are going keep this commission rate in further as well, they will loosing good links and seo power which comes from affliate sites, amazon keep their top ranking for every category with support from network of affliate sites , dont think they want to see less brand visibility in serps, im pretty sure they are more analytical than saving few dollars by rereducing the rate
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Several people who talked to Amazon worker told it was permanent. The email doesn't give any hint about how it could be temporary either.
Not completly sure how affiliate links count towards SEO but I would be surprised if it was this big.
And Google has a white list about very high autority sites to put in the first page whatever the links they receive (Wikipedia, Amazon and a few others).
I remember some SEO discussions that when Google doesn't know really what to put, they put Amazon and some reputable ecommerces just to fill the blanks.
The surge in sales is temporary because of the lockdown. Maybe some people at Amazon thought it was the best time to cut commissions so it would be less noticed because extra sales could compensate commission cuts for a month. Maybe they give zero fuck too. Who knows?
 
Being a monopoly they just wished us all the best then slashed our income by half. I can't understand why some people would still be willing to support them. Remember the huge incomes people used to post on Google Adsense back in the day, then we all moved to Amazon Affiliate which welcomed us and has just served us our butts on a golden platter
 
I am an Amazon affiliate and had been a seller on it for more than a year and I couldn't succeed in that because Amazon was cutting too much referral fee which was almost double of the profit I was making. It roughly takes 20-25% in total of your product's price and you get around 7-10% profit hardly. So, why does this greedy Bezos wants to cut more of the commission of affiliate marketers? If he is already getting 25% of the profit and was sharing 5-6% commission to his affiliates, then what was the need to reduce that to 1% and obtain a whopping 24% of the commission by himself?
 
Damn, thats insane, but the world moves on just like Amazon. We just have to change strategies. The lower commisions means that you have to increase volume of sales or if you dont want to stick to Amazon youll just have to try and find other Affiliate programs.
 
I guess many affiliates knew that this was going to happen no matter what. It's their policy and we can only request them.
 
I don't like what Amazon did, but in many countries (in EU at least) there are so many other stores that offer affiliate commission. Amazon is not so big here, and they are not so competitive either. It's easy to find better prices at local online stores in every country. I don't know about US but for EU this is not such bad news.
 
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