As you might recall Amazon announced a reduction in affiliate commissions effective April 21st of this year.
Many of you wrote me out of concern for what this could mean for your sites, your income, and your future earnings potential.
My opinion was (and is) that Amazon made that change in order to align rates due to the increased online buying that was taking place as a result of the pandemic.
I don't believe they were trying to short affiliates.
Instead, I believe they were aligning the rates with a change in the market such that affiliates would continue to earn what they had been earning.
If they had not adjusted rates they would have paid affiliates twice what they were paying for no additional work.
Again, this is just my opinion.
My Amazon Associate earnings are in line with that opinion.
In April my Amazon earnings were 95.8% higher (almost double) the average of my January to March earnings.
The average for May through July is 12% higher than the average for January through March. I added no new posts to any of my websites during that time. (I've excluded April from the comparison since the change went into play during that month.)
So, do I think the Amazon Associates program is still worth targeting? Yes!
What will be of utmost interest is how they deal with those rates IF online buying trends decline but that doesn't look to be happening any time soon.
According to an article in emarketer.com it may take up to 5 years for offline sales to return to normal levels!
