Essential Info - Check Your Amazon Associate Affiliate Settings
84The Mistake I Made as an Amazon Affiliate
Amazon is one of the many companies on the internet that offer an affiliate program or associate program as they call it. I'm not sure it's the best affiliate company out there since they only offer up to 8% comission on sales. But regardless of this, whether your an article writer, affiliate marketer or website developer there's something you need to know about how the Amazon affiliate program works.
It's has taken me over 6 months to find this out, so you could call me stupid, thick or just plain dumb - I don't care and really I deserve it, but I don't want you to miss out on potential sales by making the same silly error.
Many thanks to Don W for asking this question in the forums because this is what prompted me to check my amazon affiliate settings and I'm so glad I did.
I thought that signing up as an Amazon affiliate would be the same as signing up for Adsense or Ebay, in that one affiliate code would cover the whole globe, and that no matter where someone lived, when they clicked on my Amazon products it would magically show them products from their part of the world. NOT SO!
Each Countries' Amazon is Seperate
Each country has it's own seperate Amazon business which means that if you are signed up for Amazon.co.uk then people living in America (or in any other part of the world) will not be able to buy your products. I made this mistake on my hubpages account and my website. Only those living in the UK are able to buy from my website which is pretty rubbish seeing as most of my visitors come from the US.
Amazon Affiliate Settings for Hubbers
This knowledge is especially important for hubbers as Hubpages will only show products from Amazon.com which is based in America. So if you have diligently typed in your amazon.co.uk, amazon.au or any other countries amazon code in your affiliate settings it will look like it's working fine but you will not make a bean!
How to Check your Amazon Affiliate Settings in HubPages
Go to My Account, then click on Affiliate Settings. Scroll down to where your affiliate codes are. Your amazon affiliate code should end in the number 20. If it does then everything is fine, as 20 is the number that shows an amazon.com affiliate code. If your affiliate code shows any other number at the end then you have your settings wrong and you will need to apply for an amazon.com associate account instead.
Now that you know this, all you have to do is sign up to be an amazon.com affiliate (or associate) as they like to call us. Click here to go to the sign up page. On the right of the page click on "Join Now for Free." If you are not sure what to type in for your website profile etc use this guide from HubPages.
Amazon Affliate Settings for Web Developers
Basically the same rules apply for webmasters as for hubbers. If your site targets US customers then you need to make sure your amazon associate account is with amazon.com and not with any other countries' amazon.
If you want to sell to more countries then you will need seperate pages on your site for each country and apply to each countries amazon company for their respective associate codes. You may even consider setting up different websites for each country you want to sell in.
Amazon Associate Forums
It wasn't until I was searching for answers to Don W's question that I stumbled onto the Amazon Asociates forums which I had never seen before. This was ultimately where I found out that each amazon is a seperate business and most of the rest of the imformation I have related here.
There is a great deal of useful information there to help us improve our amazon sales and really get to understand what we're working with. Go to the Amazon Associate Homepage, and on the right underneath the box where you sign in there is link to the discussion boards.
There are also many indepedent Amazon Affiliate Forums out there. Here are just a few:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=75
http://www.code4gold.com/forums/Amazon-Associates/
http://forum.abestweb.com/forumdisplay.php?s=05b7d959d7bb3e7ff576694cb37f9811&f=80
And finally.....
Good luck with your Amazon sales and may we all make our fortunes!
Please remember to rate this up if you found it helpful.
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Comments
Thanks, need to check this out!
Thanks for this. Just checked my account number and it ends with 20. Very useful Hub
Love and peace
Tony
Yep, mine ends in 20. You definitely are going to help many hubbers in our community having written this, Susana S. Thanks!
Thanks everyone for your comments. If you signed up to amazon through hubpages you should be ok - (I do hope so), but many of us already had amazon affiliate codes and just pasted them in (like I did), not really thinking about which amazon we were signed up to. I'm glad I've got it sorted out now and I hope this hub will be useful to the non US hubbers in our community.
Yep my is a 20. I guess I will have to put a LARGE CLICK HERE on my hubs, as nothing happens. Plus I can not work out how to add an Amazon store.. which I think is best.
Thanks for this Susana. A great help to the slowbos like me.
Hey PearlDiver - the only amazon sales I've had are from a hub I wrote specifically selling products from there. Didn't make lots of money yet, but heck, it's a sale! Is it possible to put an A-store in a hub? Didn't know that! I've got one on my website which was easy enough to do. Email me if you want any help with that :)
Wow. I never knew that. Fortunately, mines a US one, but that's more a function of living here than knowing anything about anything. Is this the same for Canada? (If you know?) If my link sends them to Amazon.com but they ship to Canada do I lose my affiliate end?
thanks alot. This whole thing if full of traps. Generous to share information.On the other hand does this mean that only Americans in America can buy books?? I am a Brit living in France. I suppose on my web site I should have uk Amazon? Or can I put the French one on French pages??? Information overload
Hi Les Trois - what it means for your hubpages is that you can only sell to Americans from America (and poss canadians I'm not sure). That should be ok as most of HP's visitors are from america.
For a website you run, my advice would be to check where most of your visitors come from - that is the most important thing. If most come from France then get an amazon.fr associate code. If from UK a amazon.co.uk code and so on. If there's an even distribution maybe think about having a different sales page for each country.
Hub LLama - You should get a percentage of any sale you refer to amazon.com no matter where it's shipped to.
It's just that when someone not in the US sees the shipping charge they may decide to go onto their local amazon and find the product and buy from there instead. In that case you would not get a percentage.
Is it possible to have an affiliate Amazon account in various countries ?
Hi Ellen, yes you can but you need to sign up to each one individually. There isn't a global amazon affiliate account. I have both amazon.com and amazon.co.uk accounts but at the moment i'm only using the .com one on my website because i can't be doing with the fuss of having to have different pages or link modules for different countries.
On HP you can only use an amazon.com acount.
Wow....Thanks for the tips...I now need to check my settings.
Just posted my first hub and had fallen into the "trap" of just carrying my existing UK affiliate code over so this info was just perfect for me. Much appreciated - thanks for sharing!
Thank you so much! I'm using your hubs as a resource - This is a subject I need to learn about - have just stared a dot com and really need more information on how to make it work! Kartika
thank you so much for posting this - I asked a question on the subject in the help forum this morning and then came across this, it's answered my question and I've posted a link to this page under my question for anyone else who was wondering :)
fortunately I dumb enough not to know that there are so many amazon!
Pete Maida says:
3 months ago
Thanks for telling us about this. I will be checking my settings.