Amazon affiliate marketing is a growing part of brand marketing portfolios, and for good reason: it blends the precision and cost control of affiliate marketing with the conversion-friendly setting of Amazon storefront and product pages.

Brands looking for incremental revenue streams through Amazon Affiliate are finding an extra layer of management on top of affiliate’s otherwise-fragmented landscape. This complexity, and the need for a network of partnerships to find and engage users throughout the purchase journey, has brought a lot of clients to DMi’s doorstep asking for help standing up their new Amazon affiliate campaigns. To address this need, we’re introducing a new service called ACE (Amazon Commissioning Engine), which combines the depth and breadth of DMi’s affiliate offerings with Amazon’s revenue-driving capability.

In this post, I’ll dive into a primer on Amazon affiliate marketing: what it is, considerations to take into account when adding it to your affiliate portfolio, and the additive benefits you’ll gain when you take the plunge successfully.

What is Amazon affiliate marketing?

Amazon affiliate marketing has the same infrastructure as affiliate marketing but sends users to brand or product pages on Amazon, not brands’ own e-commerce pages. Brands or agencies use affiliate partners – content, influencers, deal sites, coupon sites, etc. – to achieve the usual affiliate goals, namely to gain awareness and incremental revenue for the products in focus.

In a saturated Amazon landscape, with high PPC costs for Amazon ads and fiercely competitive brands vying for the buy box and organic rankings, affiliate is an effective way to bring users from third-party sites directly to Amazon brand or product pages.

What do you need to know before taking the plunge?

Amazon has built a retail ecosystem all its own. This presents an opportunity for advertisers to engage an absolutely massive base of users, many of whom are more likely to buy on Amazon than anywhere else online.

While Amazon Affiliate represents a potential jackpot of incremental sales, its ecosystem does present some differences from traditional affiliate campaigns, specifically for margin management and battling preferences for Amazon-branded products.

The margin piece presents challenges at the SKU (or, in Amazon parlance, the ASIN) level; brands give Amazon a percentage of any products they sell in Amazon Affiliate, and because Amazon SKUs all have different margins, the headroom for affiliate commissions varies from SKU to SKU.

Managers within the Amazon Associates Program, which is Amazon’s native network of affiliates, are incentivized to sell Amazon-branded products, which curtails the scale for other brands.

DMi’s ACE offering helps brands address these challenges by working with our own networks of partners and by integrating Levanta, an affiliate tracking partner integrated with the Amazon marketplace. This combination allows brands to access a broad swath of affiliate placements and set commissions at the SKU level to ensure profitability.

What do you stand to gain from effective Amazon affiliate marketing campaigns?

Particularly given Prime’s huge membership ranks and the benefits those users enjoy when they shop on Amazon, Amazon affiliate marketing gives brands a way to engage a base of users they wouldn’t access through their owned properties.

The other big benefit of Amazon affiliate marketing is that it opens up relationships with certain publishers – Wirecutter, to name one – who have a strong preference for featuring Amazon-listed products. There’s a subset of publishers who rarely offer brands placement to D2C sites, and Amazon Affiliate represents an avenue for brands to get featured and get market share in those publications.

Our perspective at DMi is that Amazon’s retail dominance is positioned to persist for years, and any strategies you can employ to take advantage of its clout will pay off, particularly when combined with Affiliate’s full-funnel capabilities.

If you’re interested in learning more about Amazon Affiliate, or reaching out to talk about how you can take advantage of our new ACE service, we’d love to chat!