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Selling books online for referral commissions is a useful way to supplement
the income form any site, but watch out for the big shark.
Amazon is the world's largest bookstore and a pioneer of many features and
techniques which have contributed to the development of e-commerce. Well,
they're not just a bookstore anymore they sell just about every consumer product
you could care to buy online. They were certainly among the first to use
affiliate marketing, or associates as Amazon call their affiliate program.
Before we look at the big flaw in the Amazon associates program lets just look
at what are Amazon.com's major virtues. Their search system and enhancements are
first class. Once you find an item you can find suggestions for similar items in
dozens of ways.
Amazon has cleverly incorporated the behaviour and expressed opinions of its
huge customer base into enhancements to enable customers to be exposed to
similar items. It does this by customer reviews, customer lists of favourites,
customer how to guides and lists of items bought by customers who also bought
the item you are looking at. Search inside is a All of this adds up to better
service to the customer, and of course, more sales for Amazon.
Amazon's A9.com search engine is an outstanding resource with unique featues
which are invaluable to all manner of web research.
But let's look at the associates program. The deal is you can use a website or
other means to refer potential customers to Amazon. Depending on how you set up
your links the customer is referred to a particular item, a group of items in a
particular category or the site as a whole. There are plenty of ways to
customise this.
If the referred customer buys the item, then the referrer (associate) gets a
small commission (5%-7.5%) If the customer orders buys within 24hrs, then the
commission is paid, otherwise the referrer gets nothing.
The problem with this arrangement is that the associate gets very little reward
for his or her effort. Many people do not buy items on their first visit.
Because the Amazon name is already so well known many customers will go straight
back to Amazon to find the item, and the sale will not be credited to the
referrer.
So all of the work of the referrer in pre-selling the item is wasted, at least
for the associate. Amazon, on the other hand, gets another customer, probably
long term. I'm not sure what proportion of Amazon's sales are return sales from
existing customers.
The first sale is the hardest to achieve, once a customer has broken the ice
they will keep coming back for more. This is especially true of books, we are
never satisfied with just one book, whereas there is a limit to how many TV's or
digital cameras we may buy.
I believe Amazon is being very short-sighted in its associates program.
Associates could be rewarding associates who deliver them customers, rather than
sales. they could do this by extending the life of the cookie, by giving some
credit for subsequent sales, and by giving associates some sort of credit for
introducing new clients to Amazon.
The guys who are running the show at Amazon are smart enough to devise a better
scheme and do all the technical stuff to make sure it is tracked. They just have
a blind spot when it comes to adequately rewarding associates. they need a new
paradigm, associates are giving them customers, not just sales.
My advice is to use Amazon with caution, you may be better served by putting
Google ads on your site and picking up a few cents per sale, rather than trying
to sell through Amazon and seeing the commissions slip through your fingers.
If you really want to sell books there is a much better program available, with
higher commissions, and lifetime cookies. You can get 10% commission on the book
you promote and 10% on all subsequent purchases by that customer whenever he or
she returns, be it next day, next week or next year. You can find out about it
at
http://www.ozarticles.com/smart-bookselling.html
About the Author
Darby Higgs, a Melbourne based writer and Net marketer is editor of Ozarticles.
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