Amazon Associates Fee Structure – Earn More than 4%

I have been making good money with the Amazon Associates program since late 2008. I have good rankings for my Amazon stores on search engines. As per my knowledge the Amazon Associates program pays you around 4% on your sales. This means you earn $4 if you sell a product worth $100. I am very bad at tracking my payments and need to have a close watch on this. Amazon pays you after every 2 months so most of the times you lose track on how much you have earned and when are you actually paid. Also, there is no paypal option which means the only option here in India is to get a cheque which takes ages to come.

While checking a few options in my Amazon Associates control panel, I came across a link that says "Change Your Fee Structure". This link is under Account Settings > Payment Information. There are 2 fee structures on Amazon Associates program. One is a flat 4% which is teh default and the second one is performance based. Performance based means your commission will increase from 4% to a maximum of 8.5% if you have more numbers of items shipped.  Below is the chart on what your commission will be:

 After seeing this, I obviously changed my Fee structure to performance based. I logged in to my account a couple of hours later and guess what? My earnings for April 2009 were increased by more than double!!!! I felt happy and sad at the same ime because I had lost so much of my earnings by just ignoring this option.

If you are making money with Amazon Affiliate program then make sure you too select the performance based option to earn more.I don’t understand why such an option is given when people will select ther performance based option for sure. Is there a catch in this? I don’t see any.