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If you are a content creator, Amazon’s Influencer and Affiliate Program both offer unique earning opportunities. In 2022, Amazon paid over $9 billion in commissions through its affiliate marketing programs. Influencers can earn higher commissions by showcasing products on personalized storefronts, while affiliates promote products through direct links.
What is the exact difference between the Amazon influencer program and the Amazon Affiliate Program, and which of the two is right for you? We will cover all of this in detail in this article.
The key difference between the Amazon Influencer Program and the Affiliate Program lies in how content creators promote products.
The Influencer Program allows creators to build personalized storefronts on Amazon, earning commissions from products featured there, ideal for creators with a strong social media presence. In contrast, the Affiliate Program focuses on earning through direct links shared on websites, blogs, or social media, making it suitable for those driving traffic through written or digital content.
Now let's take a look at both programs a bit more in detail.
The Amazon Influencer Program is designed specifically for content creators with a strong social media presence, allowing them to earn commissions by promoting products through a personalized storefront on Amazon. Below is an example of how an Amazon storefront within the influencer program looks like.
As an influencer, you can curate product recommendations and share the storefront link with your audience, making it easier for followers to shop directly from your page. Influencers earn commissions on purchases made through their storefront, providing a streamlined way to monetize their content across platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and more.
The program is best suited for creators who want to drive sales through visual content and engage their followers with curated product selections.
The Amazon Affiliate Program, also known as Amazon Associates, is a popular option for bloggers, website owners, and content creators looking to earn commissions by promoting Amazon products through direct affiliate links.
As an affiliate, you can share these links on your website, blog, or social media, earning a commission when someone clicks the link and makes a purchase. The program covers a wide range of product categories, with commission rates typically ranging from 1% to 10%.
This program is ideal for those who create written content or manage platforms that can drive traffic through direct links, offering a simple way to monetize your audience’s shopping habits.
To join the Amazon Influencer Program, you’ll need to meet the following criteria:
Amazon evaluates your application based on these factors to determine eligibility for the program.
To join the Amazon Affiliate Program, you’ll need to meet these basic criteria:
Amazon will review your site and content to ensure it aligns with their guidelines before approving your application.
Below are some of the biggest benefits of Amazon’s influencer program.
By creating your own Amazon storefront you can curate the look and feel of your storefront. Use a custom banner and include a suitable profile picture.
Through the customized storefront, you will be able to offer a more personalized shopping experience for your fans. Compared to traditional affiliate partnerships, where you link to another brand website, your followers will see your profile picture and a nicely designed storefront which can lead to higher conversion rates and, thus, higher earnings.
The personalized storefront creates more trust with consumers compared to being directed to an unknown website. Seeing you in the storefront recommending products leads to more trust, which in turn can result in higher conversion rates and higher earnings.
Below are the most important drawbacks of the Amazon Influencer program.
One major drawback compared to the Amazon affiliate program is that you aren’t able to link to specific product pages within the Amazon influencer program. You are only able to link to your storefront. If you have a lot of products in your storefront, this can make it difficult for your fans to find products which can reduce conversions and thus, earnings.
Although you can customize the banner image and profile picture of your storefront, the scope of customization is fairly limited. You are, for example, not able to customize the product page, which is possible with other platforms like Creator Hero.
With the Amazon influencer program you can only create one storefront per country. For example if you are an US based influencer you would create a US storefront.
Most influencers however have an international audience. If for example your audience consists of 60% US followers, 30% UK and 10% other countries, you would only be able to monetise through 60% of your audience.
Some influencers do create multiple storefronts one for each country which you could add to your linktree for example but this could sometimes confuse consumers and lead to lower conversion rates.
Below are the most important benefits of the Amazon Affiliate Program.
With Amazon’s Affiliate program you are able to link to specific product pages. This makes it easy to write in depth reviews through a blog article for example and link to product pages. Reducing the steps to checkout often increases your conversion rate which in turn increases your earnings.
The Amazon Associates Program has fewer entry barriers, making it easier for you to get started if you are only getting started with a small website.
You can promote products through direct links on websites, blogs, newsletters, and social media, offering broader promotional options compared to the influencer storefront model.
Unlike the Influencer Program, you don’t need a large social media following; you can earn commissions through written or digital content platforms.
Amazon Associates allows you to create multiple affiliate links for different regions, making it easier to earn globally, whereas the Influencer Program is often focused on a single storefront in a specific country.
Key Takeaway: What are the Amazon Influencer Program benefits vs the affiliate program? The Amazon Influencer Program offers personalized storefronts where creators can showcase recommended products, making it ideal for influencers on visual platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. This program is tailored for those with a strong social media presence, allowing easy sharing of curated items. In contrast, the Amazon Affiliate Program is more accessible, open to anyone, and offers a wider range of promotional methods, like blog links and websites, but lacks the personalized storefront feature. Both provide commission opportunities, but the Influencer Program is more suited to creators which have their main audience on social media whilst the affiliate program is more suited for creators which have their main audience on their blog or newsletter.
As an affiliate, you have to rely on individual product links, missing out on the cohesive shopping experience that a personalized storefront offers.
If you have a strong personal brand, it can be beneficial to merge your presence into the shopping experience to increase conversion rates which is difficult to achieve through the affiliate program.
You’ll need to generate and manage multiple links for each product you promote, while influencers can direct their audience to a single storefront.
Posting affiliate links on websites or blogs may not engage your audience as effectively as a curated, visual storefront.
If you rely on website traffic, it can be harder to convert visitors, whereas influencers can more easily drive sales using their social media presence.
Sharing links on social media may not create the seamless shopping experience that influencer storefronts provide, making it harder for your audience to browse products in one place.
In this section we will explain everything you need to know in regards to commission rates and payments.
The commission rates you earn with the Amazon influencer program or the affiliate / associates program are the same and depend on product categories.
These rates typically range from 1% to 20%. For example, luxury beauty products can earn you up to 10%, while home, garden and pet products might offer only 3%. These rates keep changing, so make sure to keep an eye on the commission structure on Amazon’s official website.
Below is an overview of the fixed commission income rates by category.
As you might know Amazon is a marketplace where various merchants / brands list their products. Now you might be asking yourself who is paying for the commission you earn. For both the influencer as well as the associates program, Amazon handles all payments, meaning you don’t receive commissions directly from merchants.
How it works is that Amazon takes a portion of the merchants / brand’s sales as a marketplace fee (usually around 15-20%). Amazon takes this money to pay out influencers and affiliates.
You can choose to receive your earnings via direct deposit, Amazon gift cards, or check, with a minimum payout threshold of $10 to $100 depending on your chosen payment method.
Amazon pays commissions approximately 60 days after the end of the month in which the qualifying purchases were made, giving time for returns or cancellations to process.
You can read more details on this on the official website of Amazon here.
For inspiration, it is often best to look at other successful storefronts. Don’t just copy everything someone else is doing, but it can always be useful to analyze what other creators are doing well, learn from them and implement certain things in your own way.
One influencer who is doing really well on Amazon is Julianna Claire. Take a look at her Amazon storefront here.
It all starts with creating a well-designed storefront to provide a personalized shopping experience for your followers. Make sure to add a cover image that reflect your personal branding, add an HQ profile picture and organize your categories in a structured and easy-to-access way.
Using all the capabilities will ensure that your storefront performs at its best once you guide traffic to it from your social media. Examples are:
Curations are organized product collections focused on specific themes or categories, helping your audience easily browse grouped recommendations (e.g., "Best Home Office Essentials”).
Your followers can click on these curations to access products to purchase (see below).
Idea lists are typically shown under your curations and include recommendations based on specific themes or needs. These lists, such as "Top Travel Essentials" or "Must-Have Fitness Gear," make it easy for your followers to find and purchase items you’ve handpicked.
Amazon offers the feature to pin your favorite product categories, similar to pinning posts on Instagram, so they always show on top of your page. We recommend pinning your best-selling categories on top to maximise conversion.
Regularly share your storefront link across platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, or Facebook. Visual content, such as product demonstrations or reviews, can drive more traffic to your storefront.
The best way to share your Amazon storefront is through Instagram stories or in your YouTube video description box. Stories are a great way to casually showcase certain products in action and link to the respective products.
This can make product recommendations look less commercial. What also works well is to react to certain DM’s showing that other people in your audience are asking questions and recommendations. Screenshotting and posting these conversations on stories with the link can be a genuine way to share these product recommendations with your audience. Bring us to the next point, which is to engage your audience.
Actively engage with your followers by answering questions, hosting live sessions, or creating stories highlighting products. The more engaged your audience, the higher the likelihood of purchases.
Capitalize on shopping events like Black Friday or holiday seasons. Highlight deals and trending products to boost sales during high-traffic periods.
Regularly update your storefront with relevant and trending products that align with your followers’ interests. Featuring a mix of bestsellers and niche items can appeal to a broader audience.
Make sure that your storefront is easily accessible for your audience. This includes adding the link to your storefront in your link in bio, linktree and / or Youtube about me section.
As previously mentioned the focus for the Amazon affiliate program lies more on bloggers compared to the influencer program, which has a stronger focus on social media. However, there are ways to leverage the affiliate program through your website as well as social media. In fact, we recommend this to maximise your earnings.
As a general rule in digital marketing, the fewer the steps to checkout, the higher the conversion rate. It is quite simple: the more steps a consumer needs to go through, the more chances that they drop off.
That being said, a great way to maximise conversion with the affiliate program is that you can directly link to product pages (instead of your storefront with the influencer program).
Instagram stories are a great way to show products in action and directly link to the respective product page and earn commission through the affiliate link.
We all know the articles on Google starting with “Top 10 Best etc. etc.”. These kinds of articles are called listicles and are often favored by Google as they provide an easy way for people to find what they are looking for.
If you have a blog publishing these kinds of listicles can help to increase conversions. As the search intent is often very high, conversion rates are often also higher. Think people typing into Google “best holiday gifts”. These people are most likely looking for the right products to buy.
You can add multiple options in the articles which all have an affiliate link to certain Amazon products.
If you are a content creator chances are that you have an engaged newsletter. A great way to maximize earnings using Amazon’s affiliate program is to include product recommendations in your newsletter and add affiliate links.
This is probably one of the most obvious which should always be on top of your priority list as a content creator. However, sometimes creators forget that even with product recommendations, it all comes down to quality content.
By going the extra mile to research details, and special offers and highlighting certain benefits and drawbacks of products you recommend will increase trust, rankings in Google and, with it, your earnings.
Ensure your website or blog is optimized for search engines by using relevant keywords, meta tags, and engaging headlines. The more organic traffic you drive, the more likely your affiliate links will generate sales. One underestimated element of SEO are backlinks. A great way to increase the number of backlinks to your website and thus your DR (Domain rating) is through partnering with other content creators in your niche.
Amazon provides affiliate reports showing which links are driving the most sales. Use this data to focus on high-performing products and adjust your strategy accordingly.
The profitability of the Amazon Affiliate Program versus the Amazon Influencer Program depends on several factors, including the type of content you create, your audience, and how you promote products. Let's break it down:
If you have a large social media presence, the Amazon Influencer Program may offer better-earning potential due to higher engagement and personalized curation. On the other hand, if you rely mostly on written content or website traffic, the Amazon Affiliate Program might be more profitable due to its broader reach and ease of linking.
Yes, you can join both the Amazon Influencer Program and the Amazon Affiliate Program. The two programs are not mutually exclusive, and many content creators use both to maximize their earning potential.
While the Affiliate Program allows you to generate affiliate links for any Amazon product and share them across blogs, websites, or social media, the Influencer Program provides a personalized storefront for curating and promoting products to your followers.
By participating in both, you can leverage the strengths of each platform to reach a broader audience and increase commissions.
Below are some of the best alternatives to Amazon’s influencer and affiliate program.
Similar to Amazon’s influencer program Creator Hero provides all the tools to create your own storefront. You could compare it to Shopify for content creators. The benefit of Creator Hero is that the level of customization is a lot higher compared to Amazon storefronts.
You can edit product pages by uploading your own images, changing and updating product descriptions. The products you share in your storefront will link to the brands’ website directly.
Besides storefront capabilities, Creator Hero also offers creating your own blog, newsletter and adding ad sense to monetise your traffic.
Another benefit is that you own your customers. You will collect email addresses of the people who place an order through your storefront, which is a valuable asset to continue to build your business around your audience.
ShopyMy provides shoppable storefronts for content creators not limited to Amazon. Although the level of customization is limited it is a simply and easy way to start recommending products and earn affiliate commissions.
Similar to ShopMy, LTK also offers shoppable storefronts, which can be an interesting alternative to Amazon’s affiliate and influencer program.
With a focus on fashion, beauty, home, and lifestyle products, LTK enables influencers to create customizable shoppable content through their app and social media platforms. Your storefront links to the respective brands website through which you can earn commission.
When sharing Amazon affiliate or influencer links, it’s essential to clearly disclose your partnership with Amazon to comply with both Amazon’s Operating Agreement and FTC guidelines. Transparency builds trust with your audience and ensures you're following legal requirements. Here’s how you can disclose this:
Include a simple disclosure, such as “As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases” or “This post contains affiliate links; I may earn a commission.”
Make sure the disclosure is visible and not hidden in small text. It should be placed near the affiliate link or at the beginning of a post, video, or social media caption.
On platforms like Instagram Stories, use hashtags like “#ad” or “#affiliate” to ensure followers understand the nature of your relationship with Amazon.
Choosing between the Amazon Influencer Program and the Amazon Affiliate Program depends on your goals, audience, and content strategy. Here are some key considerations to help you decide:
In conclusion, whether you choose Amazon’s Influencer Program or the Affiliate Program depends on your content style and platform. The Influencer Program is ideal if you have a strong social media presence and want to offer a personalized shopping experience through a curated storefront. On the other hand, the Affiliate Program is better suited for bloggers and website owners who prefer promoting products through direct links. Both programs offer unique benefits, and understanding their differences will help you decide which fits your content creation goals.
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