The Good Old Days With the Amazon Affiliate Program

Back in the good old days, when I wasn't yet persona non grata for the Amazon Associate program and when collaborating with Amazon was still lucrative, I was the proud owner of around a hundred Amazon affiliate shops. You see, working with Amazon still pays off today, though the earnings are only a fraction of what they used to be (I mean around 2008-2010).

I used Seeyouguys as the homepage for all those shops. You can see how it looked here:

Or here: Seeyouguys in 2010

As you can see, I relied on exact match domain names and interlinked content across this micro-network. And it worked brilliantly. Some pages had a few hundred visits per month, while others had several thousand.

Overall, the entire network was peaking at around 200-300 thousand visits per month. On average, these shops had a 5% click-through rate to the Amazon website, and about 5% of those visits resulted in a purchase on Amazon. On average, one purchase consisted of 1.4 products. The average price of a purchased product was $45.00, and I had an 8.5% commission rate. You can do the math yourself.

Pretty nice money, all without lifting a finger and with operational costs (domains + hosting) at around $2000/year. Amazon provided all the main content, and I had everything conveniently available through their API, optimized so that anyone who landed on an Amazon page would make a purchase. And BTW, those were the days when Amazon happily provided you (their valued affiliate partner), with reviews from real Amazon customers, which today they consider an untouchable family treasure.

E.g. the above page contained 97 customer reviews. Pure gold! Buy Professional 11 Foot Drywall Lift on Drywall Panel Lift (com) (archive.org)

The greatest charm of Amazon is that it's simply a customer conversion machine. Everything is fine-tuned, optimized, shopping cart abandonment is minimal, cross-sells, upsells, whatever-sells, Amazon just sells. And with every sale, you get the commission. Even though I never directly sold books, I sold hundreds over the years. Even though I never sold CDs, DVDs, or MP3 recordings, I sold loads of them.

Of course, good times don't last long. Amazon gradually introduced several restrictions. I can't remember the exact order, but they gradually reduced the cookie validity from 30 days to 24 hours, banned the use of reviews (or removed them from the API), introduced request throttling, and gradually reduced commissions in various categories to today's level.

To achieve the same income, it took much more effort, but mainly, Amazon stopped supporting mindless copy-paste affiliate stores like mine. So, sometime during 2012, I completely abandoned the concept of Amazon affiliate store networks and redirected my energy to niche content sites.

But that's a story for another time.