What's the benefit of Amazon Associates tiered compensation plan?
April 8, 2004 4:04 PM   Subscribe

Amazon Associates: I've always been utterly confused with the tiered compensation system. Now that they've changed the rules again, what's the upshot? As far as I can tell, there's now no difference between classic and tiered, except that you get a bonus with the tiered plan if you sell more than 30 items through your website. Am I missing something?
posted by crunchland to Work & Money (6 answers total)
 
I thought there was a catch, that if you don't sell x number of units, then you get less than the classic system.
posted by mathowie at 4:21 PM on April 8, 2004


Response by poster: That's how it was before they made the changes... -20% for less than x items sold. Now they've done away with the negative ding, apparently. But I can't help but feel that there's a catch somewhere, though I can't see it, and I can't figure out why anyone would opt for the classic version now.
posted by crunchland at 4:31 PM on April 8, 2004


Yes. From what I can tell, they're trying to get people to do the tiered system.

I couldn't find a drawback, either. Of course, I only sell like 1 thing a year, so I'm not all that concerned.
posted by ajpresto at 5:31 PM on April 8, 2004


This may not be terribly helpful, but thought I'd chime in here - I used to work at amazon (down the hall from the associates group), and still happen to be a fairly active Associate - and even I get pretty confused about their whole tiering system. Always have.

I've got amazon associate accounts in the US, UK, JP and Germany, and my personal rule of thumb was for the accounts that sell 100 units+ in a quarter, the tiering system can make a nice difference. Those selling fewer than 100 units in a quarter... well, there really didn't seem to be a benefit either way, so I just stuck with the classic.

For this quarter (Q2 2004) though, they appear to be experimenting with the basic difference between a flat rate (classic) and a graduated scale (tiered) - testing performance, cost and feedback, etc. From what I can see there really is no good reason for you to choose classic over tiered - for this quarter.
posted by kokogiak at 8:17 PM on April 8, 2004


there really is no good reason for you to choose classic over tiered - for this quarter.

ah, the old "but you can cancel at any time" offer. I'm sure they'll change stuff back next quarter to the 20% ding and people will stay within the tiered system because it's too much of a pain to switch.
posted by mathowie at 8:23 PM on April 8, 2004


Actually I don't think that's their strategy. They've had one tiered system or another for several quarters now, and each time they default you back to "classic" until you explicitly choose "tiered".

There's an obvious reason why: The less active webmasters who have abandoned their sites or don't have time for them won't bother opting in to the tiers, so Amazon can pay them less. Not to mention those that just happen to miss the email, or misunderstand the difference, or...
posted by mmoncur at 1:09 AM on April 9, 2004


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