How much do Amazon associates get paid? Anyone can join the Amazon associates program and promote any product from the site. They don’t get paid (anything) until someone makes a purchase through their affiliate link. This means most new Amazon affiliates will earn very little and nothing at all until they make a sale. Amazon’s commission structure is also notoriously low, paying as little as 1% on some of its products. So many of Amazon’s affiliates will earn less than $100 a month when they get started.
However, there’s no cap on earnings with affiliate marketing so it’s possible to earn a 6 figure salary from it if you can drive enough traffic to your affiliate links.
Not all Amazon’s product pay peanuts either, so it’s not all bad news. Here’s a list of Amazon’s current affiliate commission structure. Amazon games pay the most at 20% but you can also see most of the products on Amazon fall into the commission structure of between 1% and 10% commission.
This means if you sell a product worth $100, you’ll earn $10 at the most! Or $1 at the least depending on the category of the product you choose to promote! So, if you decide to promote products from Amazon, you’ll need to make a lot of sales to make it profitable. The most profitable items to sell on Amazon are those which cost the most and fall into the higher earning categories.
How Much Do Amazon Associates Get Paid? Driving Traffic
Because Amazon’s commissions are so low, driving traffic is going to be more difficult. With high ticket digital products, it’s much more easy to drive traffic using paid means (and still profit). But with low value products which pay less, that’s not feasible, or at the least it’s much more difficult.
So traffic can be a problem for Amazon affiliates. Joining an affiliate program is easy, but getting people to buy through your affiliate link is the tricky part! There’s a few ways to drive traffic to low value products. Blogging and video blogging are two popular ones. Depending on your niche, you can build a blog and have traffic within a few months. In more competitive topics though it’s more difficult due to the larger amount of competition.
Still, if you’re going to spend months building content to drive traffic, there’s much more lucrative affiliate programs you can join instead. Products which are digital pay much more than the physical products you’ll find on Amazon.
Digital products typically pay between 30% and 40% commission. This is obviously much more than those you’ll find on Amazon. So even if you join Amazon’s affiliate program and decide to promote products from the site, it’s worth also finding other programs which are better payers.
I’m an Amazon affiliate. But I only see tiny commissions from Amazon, so it’s not my main focus as an affiliate.
How Much Do Amazon Associates Get Paid: Selling Subscription Products
Subscription affiliate products are great for affiliates because you can earn recurring commissions from them. Items such as business tools, for example, which carry a subscription fee let affiliate earn ongoing commissions from each sale they make.
This is a great way to build up your income as an affiliate quite quickly. With one-off sales, like physical products you can only sell once to each customer – unless they buy in bulk of course. But with subscription products you can earn ongoing monthly income from each sale you make. This can add up too, when your sales start coming in more frequently.
When you choose useful products which are vital for businesses, for example, your customers are more likely to maintain their memberships over the longer term. If they do, a single sale can bring in an income for years if not decades!
Selling High Ticket Items
A high ticket affiliate product is a product priced higher than the average. Typically you can earn $500 or above from the sale of a high ticket item. You can find high ticket items on Amazon too of course, but remember the commission rate of Amazon means you’ll likely earn less than if it were a digital product. With a high ticket digital product, you stand to earn the most from a sale.
How to sell high ticket products you may wonder? Well if you find a high ticket product attached to a product range, you can also benefit from a built in sales system which sells on your behalf. Simply sell the entry level product within the sales funnel and a built in sales team will close high ticket items on your behalf.
With such a system, you only need to learn to sell a standard product. Learn more about this here.
Ultimately through selling digital, subscription and high ticket products as an affiliate, you get the biggest bang for your buck! See also the most profitable digital products.
Summary
While Amazon has a huge product range and you can choose almost anything you want to sell, it’s worth checking carefully how much you stand to earn from a sale. Amazon’s rates are low and they are notoriously bad with affiliates, slashing their commissions and making policy changes makes it very difficult to make money from the site.
Still there are good products on Amazon and you can easily monetise a website on pretty much any topic through joining their partner program. Just don’t expect much in the way of commissions from them!
A plus for Amazon though is that most people are comfortable buying from the site. A Forbes article states that 89% of consumers are more likely to buy from Amazon than other E-commerce sites. and this means you are more likely to make sales once you start attracting traffic to your website. However, the low commission rate and the high competition for organic traffic can be prohibitive and there are much more lucrative programs you can join instead, or as well.
Amazon associates can be paid nothing at all and you’re likely to earn less that $100 a month if you’re a new affiliate. But there’s no cap on earnings and the potential is there. But I wouldn’t recommend relying on Amazon as an affiliate, use it only to subsidise another affiliate income and choose high ticket and subscription products instead.
Learn more about affiliate marketing, and how to use subscription and high ticket products within your product range. Access this training resource for more into.
