Sadly, no. Amazon Associates is not a pay-per-click type of affiliate program, which is why you will only get paid whenever you generate a sale. The commission differs largely depending on the type of product your users end up buying.
If you’re in the pet niche, for example, you’ll get a 3% commission, but others are much lower, generating just 1% of the sale.
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Does Amazon Affiliate pay for clicks?
While you can’t get paid for clicks, you can indirectly generate a sale over the course of 24 hours, which is how long the cookie lasts. But there are some tricks you can use if you think that 24 hours is just not enough time to convince someone to make a purchase.
There are plugins with the help of which you can turn a click into an ‘add to cart’ action, in which case the cookie lasts for 90 whole days. Yes, that’s 3 months!
On the other hand, there are two main problems when using this method. If you make people add a product to their cart, they might get put off by it per se and not want to visit your site in the future (that has happened in the past). Moreover, you get a 90-day cookie only on the product that has been added in the cart, not on everything that that shopper orders over the 3-month period.
How much does Amazon Affiliate pay?
If you’re still having second thoughts about joining Amazon’s affiliate program, here is the list of commissions as per every shopping category they have available on the site.
Unfortunately, they slashed their commissions sometime in April of 2020. For example, for a category that now has a fee rate of 3% (such as Lawn & Garden or Baby Products), you used to get an 8% fee rate.
So that means that you can make less than half of what you used to if you rely on this affiliate program alone. What’s worse is that Amazon has a strict policy as to who can use their API.
For instance, if you monetize your site using other affiliate programs (which we have detailed in this post), you are not allowed to pull images through Amazon’s API. And guess what? You can’t copy them to your computer and then display them like that on your website as it’s against Amazon’s rules.
So, you now have two options. You either stick to the Amazon affiliate program but make considerably less money (and there are people who used to make in the thousands and they now make in the hundreds’ worth of commissions) or you stop using any plugins that work with Amazon’s API, start copying the images manually, but use only the ‘buy buttons’ to direct people to Amazon and to another affiliate site.
In our opinion, if you are seeing a lot of Amazon affiliate clicks but no earnings, there could be something wrong with your content or plugins or your audience might simply not be interested in purchasing from Amazon (very unlikely).
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How does Amazon Affiliate pay?
You can get paid by cheque, gift card, or direct deposit. For both of the last two, the threshold is $10 while for the first, there is a $100 threshold in place.
Getting paid through direct deposit used to be a lot more complicated in the past and if you wanted to be an Amazon.com affiliate, you needed to have a US-based bank account (even if you weren’t a resident and not paying taxes locally).
Things are a little easier now thanks to sites like Payoneer and others that let you create a virtual US bank account complete with all of the information that you have to supply to Amazon.
But there is another thing that has changed, too, and it’s that Amazon now lets people use their international cards and bank accounts, too, especially since they now have Amazon affiliate programs for most countries across the world.
So, if you have a niche site based in France, but you have an audience from Belgium, too, you only need a bank account (one in Euro) to get paid through direct deposit, no matter the country it is located in (as long as it’s an EU member).
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