10 Alternatives to the Amazon Associates Affiliate Program

#10 Alternatives to the Amazon Associates Affiliate Program

There are dozens of affiliate networks out there, but one of the most widely known and widely used is Amazon’s affiliate program. With good reason; it has a lot going for it, least of all the immense brand recognition of carrying the Amazon name.

Still, there are a few good reasons why you might want to use a program other than Amazon. Heck, you might just want to use one in addition to Amazon, to double up on your potential earning power through different means of marketing.

Let’s take a look at Amazon’s Affiliates program, what makes it good, and what you can replace it with should you desire to do so.

Why Amazon is a Great Affiliate Program

Before we get into negatives and alternatives, we should first discuss what makes Amazon Associates a great affiliate program. I do this not to convince you of the greatness of Amazon, but to show you what you should be looking for in another program if you want it to compete with Amazon.

It’s easy to set up and get running. It’s only a matter of minutes to set up an account, and you don’t need to pass some detailed inspection of your site as a publisher. Many affiliate programs vet their publishers, because they don’t want spam sites and sites with low volume on their system. Amazon doesn’t have to worry about that; they’re big enough to take the hit from low volume publishers, and they can filter spam sites on an ongoing basis. You can have a functioning account set up in a matter of minutes.

It has a lot of tools, features and reports. Amazon is a provider of a lot of cloud-based services, including significant resource-hogging processes, so data analysis and reporting is no problem. They do lack real time reporting, which is unfortunate, but the reports they offer stretch back as far back as 2008 and are very granular. That’s not to mention the tools that make it easier to use Amazon affiliate links. These days it’s a one-button process to generate a custom affiliate shortlink you can use on your site.

Amazon is one of the biggest and most trusted brands in the world. This is something no other affiliate program can replicate, though some will come close. Amazon has global name recognition and trust. People feel a lot more comfortable buying something through Amazon than they do through a third party website or a small business site. Amazon has a whole host of price match guarantees, support options, return policies and deals to back up its position as a global retailer. As an Amazon affiliate, you can take advantage of all of those as additional sales factors as well.

Some valuable products can have exceedingly high commissions. One of the big gripes about Amazon is the low commission rates, but I’ll talk more about those later. Here’s the thing; Amazon hasn’t been just about books in a very long time. Sure, 4% of a $3 book isn’t a lot. On the other hand, 4% of a $10,000 piece of electronic equipment is significant. You’re not stuck getting pennies on sales of nearly free ebooks.

Amazon seasonal sales can dramatically increase your conversions. Two words: Black Friday. Amazon is chock full of sales and deals, from their standard sales to their preorder bonuses to their seasonal extravaganzas. As an affiliate marketer, you would typically be unable to take advantage of sales, or would find them actively harmful. With Amazon, they’re so good they can’t help but benefit your site.

You can find just about anything you could possibly want to sell. How many products would you guess are on Amazon at any given time? Recent statistics indicate a number around 250 million items. That’s an insane number, considering you can make a commission off of pretty much all of them. No matter what you want to sell, you can find it on Amazon, and you can earn a commission for selling it through them.

You can earn commissions on products you didn’t sell. This is perhaps the best part. With most other affiliate programs, you need to sign up for an offer an sell that product through that offer. If the customer goes on to buy something else, you get nothing. With Amazon, anything the user buys when they reach the site after you refer them will earn you a commission. You could refer them for a $10 book and they remember they wanted to buy a $1,000 TV; you get the commission on the TV as well.