Amazon Cap Video Game Commissions - But You've Never Had It So Good!

Don't you just love the rubbish that some merchants come out with?

I've always seen that that merchants will try and limit our success if they see us make "too much money", but I've also always wondered how they think that reducing commissions will help them increase sales volume?

Amazon effectively have a session cookie anyway so their move to limit commissions on video games to £10 won't be encouraging me to promote them this Christmas. Perhaps that they're thinking that none of us would be stupid to promote Play.com with their crappy 2% or HMV who start off at 2% and if you're a top performer you'll get 4%. You may have to look as far as CDWow (buy.at)for a basic 4%. You may want to consider Gameseek (AF) which pays 4-5%.

But I wouldn't be ready to jump ship. Do the math. if you're doing a bit of volume your commission rate could be 6.5% so to achieve £10 commission you would have to sell £153.85 of games to be affected - which is about 4/5 regular priced games. Go back and see if sales are generally less (which may be difficult with their system).

The issue remains, that there must be sales with huge basket sizes to warrent bringing in this change, so if you do volume with Amazon, its time for a bit of number crunching whilst looking at that psuedo session cookie.

It's this bit that made me slightly miffed. Just look at the bit I've highlighted.

Dear Amazon Associates,

We hope you are enjoying the rewards of referring traffic to one of the UK’s largest Affiliate programmes?

Due to continuing high sales of Video Game products, Amazon.co.uk has taken the decision to change the fee structure paid to Associates. With effect from 00:01 Friday 1st August 2008, the referral fee payable on any Video Games Product under the Performance Fee Structure will be limited to a maximum of £10.00 per Video Game Product, regardless of the Qualifying Revenues derived from the sale of any such item.

There’s never been a better time to consider new and innovative ways of generating traffic, from setting up of a new paid search campaign or monetising of your new content site using some of our great web 2.0 tools available at http://widgets.amazon.co.uk

Please feel free to contact us with comments and feedback on this or any other issues:

http://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/contact

Regards,

Your UK Associates Team

Never been a better time? You're restricting commissions, so there was a better time - before you limited our success! Numpties!! Where's the AB's when you need them?