{"id":199,"date":"2006-04-01T08:52:16","date_gmt":"2006-04-01T13:52:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fiveforks.com\/ted\/2006\/04\/amazon_q1_results\/"},"modified":"2012-10-13T20:15:16","modified_gmt":"2012-10-14T01:15:16","slug":"amazon_q1_results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/2006\/04\/amazon_q1_results\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon Q1 Results"},"content":{"rendered":"

The quarter ended yesterday, so I got the last of my data this morning. As I said earlier<\/A> the results were much better than I expected.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n


\nBut 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

As an experiment with Amazon ads, Jeb placed an ad on his very popular Barbies and Trolls<\/A> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/A>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

See Q2 results<\/A><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Amazon Q1 Results”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1806,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions\/1806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}