not only that, but Amazon is pretty much the only company whose affiliate program cookie lasts a mere 24 hours. All other companies give you at least a month.
Wow, I hadn't done the affiliate thing with Amazon for a while and missed that change. That's a big deal and I bet it immediately cut the commissions people were getting by 10-20%.
I think the change was more like 50-60%. A lot of people shop on Amazon for other things, if you had a 30 day cookie like it used to be, you were more or less guaranteed a sale in that 30 days.
I did some analysis[1] on this for 2 merchants we send traffic to, admittedly it's not in exactly the same space the buying trends would probably be similar. The merchant with a longer history of data has 59% in the first 24 hours meaning you would be missing out on 41% of sales.
This is a trend I have noticed with affiliate programs, the closer a company comes to market saturation in a space the worse the terms get. It makes sense has had the blog post not provided links there is a good chance people will head over to amazon anyway.
In fairness, if they add stuff to their basket, the affiliate tag sticks with the item for 90 days, if I remember correctly. I certainly often add stuff to my basket and wait with the purchase for a few days or weeks, so it works for that use case.
I think this is a very important point which would invalidate a lot of the critics about affiliate links, in my opinion.
I was under the impression from years ago that the Amazon cookie was actually pretty long-lived and, for that reason, I always kind of think twice before clicking a link that I see is an affiliate link. (e.g. if I just want to check what book is linked, without thinking that the particular post "deserves" the affiliate money quite yet)
