Why I Am Choosing To Be an Amazon Affiliate?

While I am seeing a lot of negative feedback about using amazon affiliate program, Amazon is afterall a reputable business with huge variety of items to sell online. I look for the following requirements when signing for affiliation programs.

Reputation
Is the reputation of the merchant good with his customers? Do the buyers buy a lot from him? Do they keep on buying again and again? I would want to have a relationship with such a merchant, but the condition comes with the next requirement.

Is this merchant the only one of his kind?
If he is the only one who can provide the kind of product I wish to recommend and that he is famous, I would have to work with him. Up till now, I only know of Amazon who seems to have every single book on earth in their inventory. And they are almost the first place to go for books. If I were to recommend my reader to buy a book, I would just ask him to go for the bestselling online bookstore with ease.

Is the payout good?
I would consider highest payouts amongst the different merchants of the same competition. Many times for us who are just starting out, there are many deals we can’t touch because we have not enough traffic to bring in the deals. I am glad that Amazon accepted me as I am of low traffic. I believe they have to since there are many good affiliates like John Chow who don’t wish to work with Amazon because of low payouts. Talking about payouts, even in Darren Rowse’s blog talking about the secret to increase amazon earnings is time, there are many comments which actually mean low payout… Even for his blog, he wrote that he can now easily make 50 sales a day after working with Amazon affiliate for about 4 years… I guess it’s everything to do with buying again themselves after clicking that link. I am not sure if Amazon does have that cookie to maintain the affiliate with the buyer. But if they do that, it can justify better with the lower percentage payout.

Conclusion
Because of the theme of my website is about doing an insight review of internet businesses as much as I can, the tools that I use will have to be much more relevant with the market that they need, rather than the kind of money I can earn out of it. Putting my focus on giving relevancy to my readers will give me a better relationship with them too. Probably the payout for Amazon isn’t good right now, I will want to see how a good online shopping site can provide for me till I have found a better one…