General Information

What is the Amazon Integration?

Refersion’s Amazon Integration enables Amazon Registered Brands to form direct partnerships with affiliates, track their conversions and manage affiliate promotions from within the Refersion platform.

What are the benefits of using Amazon Affiliate Marketing with Refersion?

Better ROI on advertising spend. With Refersion, brands pay per conversion v.s. pay per click with Amazon’s advertising services. Performance-based marketing yields a higher ROI since brands only pay a small commission to affiliates after a sale is generated.
Higher conversion rates. By uniting Amazon and affiliate marketing, both brands and affiliates reap the benefits of Amazon’s high checkout conversion rates, 10-15% for Amazon vs. 2% for DTC eCommerce platforms.
Increase sales with better organic ranking. When Amazon sees traffic to merchant products, they rank it higher because they believe it to be more relevant. Publisher and affiliate promotional links send external traffic to your Amazon products, improving your organic page ranking; thus, increasing sales.
Leverage Amazon’s Brand Referral Bonus. Amazon’s Brand Referral Bonus program rewards an average of 10% of sales for generating conversions from outside channels. Leverage your bonus to offer more competitive commissions and attract top affiliates. (The brand referral bonus only applies to your own brand's products. If your customers happen to buy products from a different brand, then you do not receive a bonus on those sales).

Terms you should be familiar with for the Amazon Integration:

Amazon Brand Registry: The Amazon Brand registry is a program meant to offer special protections and opportunities for brand owners. It differentiates actual brands from third-party sellers.
Amazon Brand Referral Bonus: Amazon Brand Referral Bonus rewards brands for conversions that are generated from sources outside of Amazon; in the case of Refersion’s Amazon Integration, the outside traffic source will be traffic from affiliates you partner with.
Helium10: Helium10 is Refersion’s sister company that provides a robust set of tools and resources to help Amazon sellers to grow their business. We leverage their Amazon data sync to help power the Amazon integration.

What are the requirements for enabling the Amazon integration?

Your Seller Central account will need to be in the Amazon Brand Registry. (We do NOT integrate with Vendor Central). You can check Amazon's eligibility requirements here.
You must have a US Amazon store that you wish to track with Refersion (only US Amazon stores are supported at this time)
You’ll need to sign up or upgrade to Refersion’s Enterprise plan.

Managing Affiliates & Offers

Can I use the Amazon Integration if I also have a DTC store on another platform such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Bigcommerce, etc.?

Absolutely! However, you’ll need to create a separate offer for your Amazon store and list it on the Refersion Marketplace.

What is the Refersion Marketplace?

The Refersion Marketplace is our open network of affiliate partners who are actively looking to partner with merchants. Listing an offer in the marketplace is free and allows affiliates to discover your brand and apply directly to your affiliate program. You can learn more about the Refersion Marketplace here.

Is there a limit to the number of offers in my affiliate program that I can setup for my Amazon store?

No. You can create and edit as many offers as you'd like for your Amazon store's affiliate program

How many Amazon offers can I promote in the Refersion Marketplace?

Only one offer can be listed in the Refersion Marketplace at a time; therefore, you can only list one Amazon offer in the Refersion Marketplace

Can I exclude certain products from giving a commission to affiliates?

Unfortunately not. Brands can select which products are promoted to affiliates in the marketplace; however, when affiliates are promoting your products, they can receive a commission on other products in your Amazon store if the customer adds additional products from your store to their cart and purchases them.

What if an affiliate is promoting product A from my store, but the customer also purchases two other products from my store in the same transaction?

As long as the customer was driven to your Amazon product from that affiliate’s link, the affiliate would receive a commission on the total sales price of the customer’s cart for all items in the cart specific to your brand. They will not receive a commission on other brands’ products in the same cart, however.

Are there any limitations I should be aware of when setting up my Amazon offer?

Yes. Amazon provides our platform with the total sales revenue and the number of products sold by your affiliates per day. Since the data is not itemized, we have limited visibility into the exact product SKUs/ASINs purchased in an order, and customer information is excluded as well.

For this reason, some of the following features are incompatible with this integration:

Product-level (SKU) commissions: With no SKUs listed in the sales data, we can’t specify varying commissions per SKU.
SKU Exclusions: SKUs in your store cannot be excluded from giving commission since we do not have an itemized list of SKUs in the sales data.
New v.s. Returning Customers: Without customer information included in an Amazon sale, our system is unable to provide varied commissions on orders based on the customer.
Conversion Triggers: All of our conversion triggers rely on specific information being present within the order data to create conversions. Without having customer information, email triggers won’t work; without having the coupon used on an order, coupon triggers won’t work, and without SKUs, SKU triggers also won't work.
Subscription Tracking: Recurring orders generated by Amazon’s Subscribe and Save program will not generate conversions in Refersion.

Do affiliates need to generate a specific amount of traffic before they start seeing conversions?

Yes. Amazon’s attribution reporting will not include data about sales from a specific affiliate until that affiliate has met Amazon's click threshold. At the moment, the threshold listed on Amazon’s API reference is 10 (source).

What this means is affiliates need to generate at least 10 clicks before we receive any kind of sales or conversion data on sales generated from their links. For example, if an affiliate shares their referral link with a customer and the customer clicks and buys something right away, then we still wouldn’t receive the data for that sale until after the affiliate has generated at least 10 clicks.

The good thing is that it should not be difficult for affiliates to meet this threshold since we use a similar link format on all the product links. This means an affiliate can share multiple product links for the merchant with their tracking information included and clicks to those different links will count towards the minimum click threshold.

Where can I find Amazon Affiliates?

Brands will be able to search for and recruit new Amazon affiliates in the Affiliate Discovery tool in the Refersion Platform.

Can I have affiliates promoting my Amazon store and my DTC store simultaneously?

Yes, when your affiliates log in to their individual dashboards, they can grab a link to your DTC store if they’d like to promote your store in addition to Amazon. For brands on Shopify, affiliates can also grab product links to either store on their “My Products” page.

Can affiliates add SubIDs and additional UTMs to their Amazon referral links for additional reporting?
Affiliates can add subIDs to their Amazon referral links, and Refersion will report on the performance of those subIDs. Unfortunately at this time though additional UTM reporting is not supported

Why is the same ASIN being listed more than once on my Manage>Products tab?
The same ASIN may be listed on your Refersion account more than once if it has more than one SKU. One typical example why this happens is that you have a product that can be fulfilled by Amazon and that can also be fulfilled by yourself as the merchant

Conversions, Tracking, & Reporting

Can I track more than one Amazon store within my Refersion account?

Yes. You can do this by having multiple registered brands connected to your seller account or by connecting multiple seller central accounts to your Refersion account.

Will I be able to differentiate Amazon conversions from other conversions in my account?

Yes. Amazon conversions should have a source of “Amazon” which will also be reflected in any conversion reports you run from Manage > Conversions or any custom conversion reports requested from our team.

What is the cookie-day duration for Amazon conversions? Can I change this?

The cookie-day period is locked in at 14 days and cannot be changed.

Will I be able to match orders from my Amazon store to orders in Refersion?

Unfortunately not. Amazon’s reporting provides an aggregate of sales generated by the referring affiliate’s link over a certain timeframe. Therefore, we don’t have individual order IDs from Amazon we can use when generating conversions.

If a customer clicks an affiliate's referral link and then makes a purchase on Amazon, how long will it take for that conversion to show up?
Amazon usually reports unit sales to us about 24-48 hours after the order is placed, so that's how long it will take before the conversion is viewable on your Manage>Conversions tab. Amazon conversions also take 30 days to settle due to reasons like returns, etc. Because of this a conversion for an Amazon order will initially show up on your account after 24-48 hours, and then you will have to wait 30 days for the order to be settled before you can approve or deny the conversion:

The sales data on the conversion will be reduced automatically if there are returns/cancellations before 30 days elapse

I would like a report on my Amazon conversions; where would I find it?

You can submit a custom form request here to our team.

How will Refersion conversions look inside Amazon Attribution?
The attribution is shared across products. There will be multiple links on a per-affiliate basis