The quarter ended yesterday, so I got the last of my data this morning. As I said earlier the results were much better than I expected.
I sold 23 Belkin Battery Backpacks, 2 BTI Battery ii’s, 2 Griffin Tunejuice batteries, and 2 iPod travel chargers. I’m amazed that so many people chose the Belkin battery pack, though I guess that’s what I would choose too and Amazon has the best price at $25 (the Apple Store charges the full list price of $50 for the same thing). Combined with a few other items like DVD’s, CD’s (thanks, Jeb!), bass strings, and software that sold, the total was $1,016.71 in sales with a commission of $60.78.
But all is not well in the land of free money. After writing about my monster $15 day, sales plummeted and I went six days straight without a single sale before finally scoring one more Belkin battery pack on March 30. Hopefully things will return to normal where I sell an item or two a day.
However, even if I start to get better sales, Amazon announced a cut in the program effective today that will cap the commission on electronics at 4% whereas before I was getting 6.75% on most battery packs from the 4% base plus a 0.25% volume bonus plus a 2.5% direct-link bonus (the direct-link bonus only worked if the person bought the thing they clicked on from my page, but lately that was happening more often than not). Having sold 46 items in a little over a month I was hoping to get an additional 0.50% volume bonus next quarter for selling over 90 items, putting me at 7.25%. So they are cutting the commission by nearly half. I applied the new commission structure to my Q1 sales and it would have brought my earnings down from $60.78 to $46.17. I certainly don’t have to worry about breaking $600 a year now. People on the Amazon Associates discussion boards are furious as Amazon restructures the commissions every year or so to Amazon’s advantage. Items other than electronics benefit from a new and improved commission structure but the increase doesn’t really do that much for me.
As an experiment with Amazon ads, Jeb placed an ad on his very popular Barbies and Trolls page towards the end of the month. In only a week it quickly rang up 1,074 impressions with 46 people clicking on the ad to take them to Amazon, however no purchases resulted and Amazon doesn’t pay for clicks.
I said last time that the AdSense revenue had dropped off lately. In February I had 10 days where I made at least a dollar in ad clicks, but in March there were only 5. If I could have gotten $26.03 in March I would have reached the $100 payment trigger in only 4 months, but I fell a couple of dollars short so now I will get paid after April. Still, not bad.
I still haven’t sold one item through buy.com’s sales program. But I have kept researching and adding new battery packs and tweaking some of the information on the iPod Battery Pack page.
That still puts me on my way to being able to buy a new iPod in July. There are rumors that Apple will release a version where the whole front is a video touch screen. Also an Apple iPod mobile phone may be in development.
See Q2 results
Amazon knew about the order I placed through my own ad and they are deducting $2.31 from my payment. Oh well.
Yesterday someone bought a $600 GPS navigation system. If it ships that would be more than half of last month’s sales. Even with the measly 4% commission that’s $24 for a day’s no-work. Other than that and a $140 wagon, sales have stayed pretty soft with 7 battery packs in April. In the first half of March I sold 13.
Amazon paid today. Supposedly they pay on the last Friday of the month following the end of the quarter, but they must have waited until the banks closed, because it didn’t show up in my account until today.
April was a good month with $66 in earnings despite the lower percentage, with the GPS sale being about a third of my earnings. And May should start with a bang because someone bought a 30GB iPod yesterday which should ship today.
Jeb’s Barbie page still hasn’t yielded any sales and page views are way down lately. There are rumors that Google punishes pages that seem to be primarily advertising for Amazon. He had 1217 views and 67 clicks in April.