Amazon

Amazon Associates is the affiliate program for Amazon's retail catalogue, covering physical goods, digital media, devices and subscription services.

Market Place

What it is

Amazon Associates is the affiliate program for Amazon’s retail catalogue, covering physical goods, digital media, devices and subscription services. Affiliates link to individual products and earn a share of what the customer spends. It is the default monetisation route for review sites, product roundups and general-interest blogs.

The deal

The rate depends entirely on what the customer buys, and the spread across the category table is wide enough that traffic mix matters more than volume. Electronics and grocery sit near the bottom, most home and lifestyle goods land in the middle, and a handful of categories pay nothing at all — gift cards, alcohol, wireless plans and restaurant delivery among them. Anything uncategorised falls back to the same rate as apparel. The attribution window is the real constraint: a click opens a 24-hour session that also closes the moment the customer places any order, so you are paid on what they buy that day, not on the item you linked. Fine art is capped at $200 of commission per product.

Getting paid

Approval is conditional, not immediate. You get a link straight away, but the account is only reviewed once you have referred three qualifying sales, and the application lapses if you have not managed that within 180 days. Payment runs on a long lag — commission from any given month lands about two months later, which makes the program slow to produce its first real cheque. Balances under the threshold roll into the following month rather than being paid. Accounts that earn nothing for three years can be charged a maintenance fee out of any unpaid balance.

The rules

You cannot buy through your own links, and you cannot ask family, friends or staff to do it for you. Paid search is allowed to your own site but not to Amazon, and bidding on keywords containing “amazon” or “kindle” voids the commission on anything that click produces. Links in email, SMS and direct messages are only permitted to people who opted in. Framing Amazon pages, generating artificial clicks and collecting customer account details are all barred, and sites built mainly around free Kindle eBooks are excluded from earning.

Sources

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