This is the most common concern about Amazon Associates — and it’s a legitimate one. After the 2020 rate cuts, commissions dropped significantly across many categories. Most physical product categories now pay between 1% and 4%, with a handful of higher-paying categories (luxury beauty, Amazon Games) reaching up to 10%. On a $30 product at 3%, you’re earning 90 cents per sale.

That sounds discouraging — until you factor in two things Amazon does better than almost any other affiliate program. First, Amazon’s conversion rates are extraordinarily high. People trust Amazon, they’re often already logged in, and the checkout process is frictionless. A 5–10% conversion rate on Amazon clicks is not unusual, compared to 1–3% on most other affiliate sites. Second, Amazon pays a commission on everything a customer buys during their 24-hour cookie window — not just the product you linked to. Refer someone who clicks your coffee maker link and buys a coffee maker, a set of mugs, and a book, and you earn a commission on the entire order.

It is a disadvantage — there’s no getting around it. A 24-hour cookie means that if your reader clicks your link, gets distracted, and buys the product three days later, you earn nothing. Many affiliate programs offer 30, 60, or even 90-day cookie windows, which give you a much longer attribution window for purchases. By comparison, Amazon’s 24-hour window is genuinely short.

That said, the impact of the short cookie is somewhat offset by Amazon’s buying culture. Many Amazon shoppers who click a product link with purchasing intent buy within hours — not days. Amazon has made impulse buying frictionless in a way few other retailers have matched. The short cookie hurts less in practice than it looks on paper.

Amazon Associates has strict terms of service, and they do close accounts — sometimes without much warning. The most common reasons for account closure include: not generating a qualifying sale within the first 180 days of joining, violating link placement rules (such as putting Amazon links in emails or PDFs), and not disclosing affiliate relationships clearly. Amazon’s terms also prohibit certain types of price comparisons and require you to keep your links updated when product pages change.

There’s also the broader risk that Amazon changed its commission structure significantly in 2020 with little notice, and it could do so again. Any business that depends primarily on Amazon Associates is exposed to that risk.

Amazon Associates is one of the more accessible programs for new sites. The initial application is straightforward and approval is generally granted quickly, even for sites with limited content. However, there’s an important caveat: you must generate at least three qualifying sales within 180 days of joining, or your account will be closed automatically. Amazon then reviews your site manually before full approval.

This means that joining Amazon Associates too early — before your site has any meaningful traffic — can result in automatic account closure before you have a chance to earn any commissions. Many beginners make this mistake and then have to reapply.

Amazon Associates should almost never be your only affiliate program. The low commission rates mean you need high traffic volume to generate meaningful income from it alone — traffic levels that take considerable time to build. Meanwhile, many niche-specific affiliate programs offer commissions of 20–50% on products that are directly relevant to your audience, providing far better income per visitor.

The smartest approach for most beginners is to use Amazon Associates as a baseline — a fallback for any product you recommend that doesn’t have a better-paying dedicated affiliate program — while building toward two or three niche-specific programs that form the core of your monetization strategy.