Amazon sent out a letter to all of its affiliate partners yesterday offering $12 for every referred customer who signs up for a free trial of the company's $79/year unlimited express shipping program, Amazon Prime.
Amazon's affiliate program allows website owners to refer potential customers to Amazon.com and receive a cut of whatever they spend. Depending on the number of sales referred, users can make a significant amount of money like Daring Fireball's John Gruber who made more than $5,800 from a single post linking his readers to Amazon's Mac OS X Leopard pre-order page.
Amazon Prime gives subscribers free two-day shipping on just about all products sold by Amazon (not including sales not fulfilled by Amazon) and $3.99/item overnight shipping.
A $12 bonus on referrals to free trials of its $79 service suggests that Amazon wants to seriously promote the service. I've been a member of Amazon Prime for several years and found that I purchased many more items from Amazon because of the cheap expedited shipping rather than making a run to my local bookstore.
I've even gotten overnight shipping for $3.99 on some really big items like a toaster oven which certainly would have cost more than four bucks to ship.
Amazon doesn't vary product shipping fees for Amazon Prime subscribers like it does for standard customers, but in my experience, Prime customers that I know order a significantly higher number of products on average than non-Prime. Given the increase in products ordered, Amazon is probably planning to pick up enough profit on the increased product sales to cover the additional cost of free two-day shipping.
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For those of you with Prime memberships, here’s a good website for searching for Amazon Prime items:
www.amazanian.com
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