Amazon affiliate program - anyone converting with decent sales?

Hi, Everyone~

Does anyone have more information about the Amazon affiliate program? From what I can read on their outline page, it seems to be a poor choice. One thing is that if your customer doesn't purchase from them, but from one of their "third party stores" then they don't pay. When going to their site, I always buy a "new" book that is listed in the third party section - better price.

And here is a post (below) I found on the web about them - doesn't sound very good at all. Their cookie offer looks pretty lame. Does anyone convert with high sales with them? Thanks, Karuna

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I just found this post on the web:


Here are some reasons why some people like me thinks that Amazon Affiliate Program is not good as it used to be:

1. Late last year, they dropped the cookie lifetime from 30 days to 1 day.

2. The starting affiliate pay is only 4% (although that can be increased to 6.5% based on how many sales volume you can generate for them).

3. There is no one central affiliate portal where you can promote products for other countries. That is, if you singup for amazon associates US (you will know that when you have an id ending with -20), you won't get any product details from the UK).

What if you were to promote products for the UK market? Well, you would have to signup for amazon associates UK. Not only will you get a different ID, but also different payment structure. And that to me, sounds ridiculous.

Point 1 is probably the main issue for affiliates. Most affiliate programs pay at least 10% with a cookie of 30 days. Many of our earnings in affiliate programs are going to be made from purchases 10 or 30 days down the line after a user has clicked the link. So cookies are an important part keeping track who refered customers to the merchant, so affiliates can be paid for refering.

So, 1 day cookie is totally unacceptable and disgraceful!