Folio Books: referral fees

How the Amazon referral fee system works

The Amazon Associates programme enables Associates to earn a referral fee, ranging from 5% to 15% of the purchase price, on books sold via the referring site. A few items have no referral fee. The Associate provides special links to specific titles in Amazon's catalog. The special link is a long URL which includes the book's ISBN and the Associate ID.

Amazon keeps track of each customer through a unique shopping basket ID assigned at the end of the URL at the moment of connecting to Amazon, while the Associate ID in the URL tells Amazon that the customer has linked to the book from the Associate site (it's called a "click-thru"). If the customer then buys the book the Associate is paid a referral fee.

For the last few years Amazon has been paying a referral fee for anything a customer buys once they've come directly from the associate's site. This means that the associate does not necessarily have to provide links to specific items.

Amazon also makes available on their website detailed reports on click-thru's, traffic and sales which the associate can access at any time.

There were 525 click-thru's from July 20, 1997 to October 4, 1997. All I can tell you about the number of books sold is that it was greater than zero. Not much greater but every little helps. I will include some more recent information about click-thru's in the next few days.

The associate does not ever know the identity of a customer who has clicked thru and bought or not bought something on Amazon.

M.A., Oct 15, 1997, updated Sept 22, 2004

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