Why All Amazon Affiliates Must Consider Add-To-Cart Buttons

Earlier this week I spoke at Pubcon conference in Las Vegas. The topic of my presentation was Affiliate Marketing 2015. Among other things highlighted in my speech, I applauded Amazon for fairly treating those affiliates who appear to influence conversions the most — by driving the prospect to, actually, place an item into their online shopping cart. A number of people were live-tweeting from my Pubcon speech (thank you, all who did!) but the below Tweet gained the top engagement:

If you’re an Amazon affiliate there’s a huge benefit in linking to the direct to cart site via @ePrussakov #Pubcon

— Jessica Gottlieb (@JessicaGottlieb) October 6, 2015

Requests to elaborate immediately followed. Hence, this blog post.

Amazon Associates program, arguably the world’s largest and most advanced affiliate program, offers an array of linking options. They range from traditional text links and banner creatives to widgets and search boxes. However, while using most of their links affiliates only operate within Amazon’s standard 24-hour cookie life (i.e. they are compensated for orders placed by their referrals only as long as these conversions happen within a 24-hour time window that follows the click on an affiliate’s link).

There is, nonetheless, an underutilized type of affiliate link that creates a really interesting exception to the rule — the Add-to-Cart button, a linking option that allows customers to add products to their Amazon.com shopping carts directly from within an affiliate site. In situations when an add-to-cart button is clicked and the item is in the shopping cart, Amazon assures that the referring affiliate “will receive credit for the purchase as long as the customer places their order within 90 days” [emphasis mine | source].

If you are an Amazon affiliate and you are not yet using add-to-cart “Buy from Amazon” buttons, you may be missing out!