Amazon affiliate cookies last for 24 hours or up to 90 days if a product is added to the cart.
This means if a user makes a purchase within 24 hours of clicking an Amazon affiliate link then affiliate commission will be attributed to the associated Amazon affiliate account.
Be aware that if during that 24 hours the user clicks on another Amazon affiliate link then any commission will go to the account associated with the link that was clicked last.
Also if a user makes two purchases within 24 hours of clicking your link you will only receive a commission for the first sale.
Amazon’s 90 Day Cookie
It is possible to get a 90-day cookie on Amazon.
If a user adds a product to their cart you will receive affiliate commission for it providing they complete the purchase within 90 days.
90-day cookie commission is applied to one item only not the whole shopping cart.
As with the 24-hour cookie, the commission is not credited to your account until the buyer has completed the purchase, accepted delivery, and remitted the full payment to Amazon.
How To Use Amazon’s 90 Day Cookie On Your Affiliate Site
If a user goes through one of your normal Amazon links and then adds an item to their cart the 90-day rule will apply on that product.
However, there are ways of adding products to a user’s cart immediately when they click on your affiliate link.
The easiest way to set this up is to use a plugin such as the Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin (AAWP), this plugin uses the Amazon API to setup these links.
There is a check box in the settings which you can tick to automatically add items to cart:
If you prefer to save money on plugins by doing things more manually then you can use the following code to generate an ‘add to cart’ link.
Simply replace the ‘storeid-20’ with your Amazon Affiliate ID and ‘B09HJZPFDD’ with the ASIN of the product.
<form method=”GET” action=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/cart/add.html”> <input type=”hidden” name=”AssociateTag” value=”storeid-20″/> <input type=”hidden” name=”SubscriptionId” value=”[AWSAccessKeyId]”/> <input type=”hidden” name=”ASIN.1″ value=”B09HJZPFDD″/><br/> <input type=”hidden” name=”Quantity.1″ value=”1″/><br/> <input type=”image” name=”add” value=”Buy from Amazon.com” border=”0″ alt=”Buy from Amazon.com” src=”http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/associates/add-to-cart.gif”> </form>
Also read:
Why You Shouldn’t Always Use The 90 Day Cookie
Don’t make the mistake of using the 90-day cookie on all your Amazon links as this can actually hurt your revenue.
The 90-day cookie only pays commission on the specific product that is added to the cart.
You will not get a commission on anything else that they buy.
It therefore only makes sense to use the 90-day cookie on high ticket (expensive) items, using it on cheap items means you will lose out on commission if they purchase more than one thing.