A smarter way to sell books from your website.

By Darby Higgs

Why Amazon's affiliate program is not worth the trouble.

Selling books online for referral commissions is a useful
way to supplement the income from any site, but watch out for
the big shark.

Amazon is the world's largest bookstore and a pioneer of
many features and techniques which have contributed to the
development of e-commerce. Well, they're not just a
bookstore anymore they sell just about every consumer product you
could care to buy online. They were certainly among the first
to use affiliate marketing, or associates as Amazon call their
affiliate program.

Before we look at the big flaw in the Amazon associates
program lets just look at what are Amazon.com's major virtues.
Their search system and enhancements are first class. Once you
find an item you can find suggestions for similar items in
dozens of ways.

Amazon has cleverly incorporated the behaviour and expressed
opinions of its huge customer base into enhancements to enable
customers to be exposed to similar items. It does this by
customer reviews, customer lists of favourites, customer
how to guides and lists of items bought by customers who also
bought the item you are looking at. Search inside is an excellent
way for the consumer to check out exactly what they are buying.
All of this adds up to better service to the customer, and
of course, more sales for Amazon.

Amazon's A9.com search engine is an outstanding resource
with unique featues which are invaluable to all manner of web
research.

But let's look at the associates program. The deal is you
can use a website or other means to refer potential customers to
Amazon. Depending on how you set up your links the
customer is referred to a particular item, a group of items in a
particular category or the site as a whole. There are plenty of ways to
customise this.

If the referred customer buys the item, then the referrer
(associate) gets a small commission (5%-7.5%) If the
customer orders buys within 24hrs, then the commission is paid,
otherwise the referrer gets nothing.

The problem with this arrangement is that the associate gets
very little reward for his or her effort. Many people do
not buy items on their first visit. Because the Amazon name is
already so well known many customers will go straight back
to Amazon to find the item, and the sale will not be credited
to the referrer.

So all of the work of the referrer in pre-selling the item
is wasted, at least for the associate. Amazon, on the other
hand, gets another customer, probably long term. I'm not sure
what proportion of Amazon's sales are return sales from existing
customers.

The first sale is the hardest to achieve, once a customer
has broken the ice they will keep coming back for more. This is
especially true of books, we are never satisfied with just
one book, whereas there is a limit to how many TV's or digital
cameras we may buy.

I believe Amazon is being very short-sighted in its
associates program. Associates could be rewarding associates who
deliver them customers, rather than sales. they could do this by
extending the life of the cookie, by giving some credit for
subsequent sales, and by giving associates some sort of
credit for introducing new clients to Amazon.

The guys who are running the show at Amazon are smart
enough to devise a better scheme and do all the technical stuff to
make sure it is tracked. They just have a blind spot when it
comes to adequately rewarding associates. they need a new
paradigm, associates are giving them customers, not just sales.

My advice is to use Amazon with caution, you may be better
served by putting Google ads on your site and picking up a
few cents per sale, rather than trying to sell through Amazon
and seeing the commissions slip through your fingers.

If you really want to sell books there is a much better
program available, with higher commissions, and lifetime cookies.
You can get 10% commission on the book you promote and 10% on
all subsequent purchases by that customer whenever he or she
returns, be it next day, next week or next year.


About the author:
Darby Higgs is a Melbourne based writer and Net marketer.
You can find an alternative method of selling books on your
site at http://www.ozarticles.com/smart-bookselling.html




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