Without a doubt the Amazon Affiliate Program has the most partners of any affiliate program that I know of. Its probably the biggest and best known affiliate program around. If you don’t already know, Amazon.com is one of the largest online retailers. They started off selling books but now have a large range of consumer goods that include DVDs, Videos, Toys, Electrical goods and much more. Amazon pays between 5% and 15% on the sale of their goods. Basically, you get 5% for all goods except books that are sold at between 10% and 30% off. If you link directly to these, you will make 15%. Amazon also now has a sliding affiliate scale available that lets you earn between 4% and 6.5% on all sales depending on the number of sales you make each quarter. There are webmasters out there who earn thousands with the Amazon Associates program.

The affiliated site does not get anything if the user doesn’t buy during the first visit but decides to return and shop later. Other affiliates programs are more advanced and pay based on the life-time value of the referred customer and not just based on his or her initial purchase. It obviously requires more programming to keep track of users over time, but all marketing theory certainly tells us that life-time value is more important than individual sales, so hopefully we will get more affiliates programs to take the long view in the future. Here is the information directly from Amazon:

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