Being an Amazon Affiliate is Expensive!

I am an Amazon Affiliate and have been promoting their products via Google Adwords. One major issue with being an Amazon Affiliate is their tracking, you’d think the World’s number one eCommerce Store would try and help their hard working Affiliates as much as possible.

Unfortuntely this is not the case, one headache is Live Tracking which they do not offer. So, for me using Google Adwords I need to track my sales live to make sure I’m getting the best ROI (Return On Investment) and using the best converting Keywords but I cannot. I will only find this out 24 hours later and then I may have lost a lot of money.

You see Amazon track(s) sales over a 24 hour period, so I can only see If I sold that product 24 hours later which is a bit of a guessing game.

November 20th to December 27th earnings. Cost (spend) $1000 (profit 100%)

Luckily I have found some great products this month and got lucky with some others based on popularity. But this is not ideal, and I have lost money of broke even just to see if a keyword and product is going to be profitable.

The next issue I have is CashFlow, Amazon decided not so long ago to pay all of their Affiliates Quarterly. I mean Quarterly! this is a killer with PPC Affiliates – with organic guys its obviously not a problem but for the majority this is hard and can put you under unless you have a good budget. I missed out on sales because I was making so much on one product my budget ran out and I had to wait to get paid three months later!

This only happened once and now I am looking at other ways to promote Amazon products. Just some points for you to consider if you want to promote products using PPC with Amazon.

I have tried to get a programmer to work on Amazons API to get Live tracking which would mean I could make a lot of money but it still seems we cannot do it.

I will try and get around this as you really cannot lose with Amazon because of their monster brand power and loyal following. Once a consumer see’s it’s Amazon they know they are safe to purchase which ultimately leads to high conversion ratios.

For now I have to guess and hope after I spend say $100 I sold enough products to make my 100% back or even 50% I am quite happy with. With live tracking I could really tweak my campaigns and make even more money and more importantly not loss money…