Beginning on April 21, Amazon affiliates are going to be seeing lower commissions from their affiliate links sales across several product categories. This includes publishers and influencers.
CNBC first reported that the program will be cutting commission rates for home improvement products and furniture to 3% (it was originally 8%) and for grocery products to 1% (originally 5%). Everyday item categories are going to be set to only 1%. This includes Health & Personal Care and Amazon Fresh.
The product category rate changes areas follows:
- Furniture, Home, Home Improvement, Lawn & Garden, Pets Products and Pantry will go from 8% to 3%.
- Headphones, Beauty, Musical Instruments, Business & Industrial supplies will go from 6% to 3%.
- Outdoors, Tools will be cut from 5.5% to 3%.
- Sports and Baby Products categories will go from 4.5% to 3%.
- Health & Personal Care will be slashed from 5% to 1%.
- Amazon Fresh will be cut from 3% to just 1% as well.
Here’s a look at the current rate structure looks like:
Adexchanger reported that Amazon has decided to take third-party affiliate networks out of the loop. The company will be working directly with publishers. Networks won’t be getting a piece of publishers’ Amazon affiliate commissions.
Due to the pandemic, there has been an increased consumer demand that has significantly strained Amazon’s fulfillment capabilities. It has affected Amazon sellers, making a number of them pull back advertising on products due to inventory shortages. According to The Information Amazon has had to hit pause on direct affiliate programs with publishers such as BuzzFeed and Vox.
For the time, affiliate campaigns for casual clothing have been outperforming many other categories during the pandemic, as many people are working from home. This come from data by Keywee, a content distribution platform. After casual clothing is family and home categories, driven by pet toys and children’s online safely products.
“All of these [campaigns] have been wrapped in a very positive tone and messaging on the campaign level, with emojis, for example, being far more prevalent compared to other types of paid distribution campaigns,” Inbar Yagur, Keywee’s head of product marketing, said in an email.