Amazon Onsite Commission Rates: Two Tables, Not One

The short version

Sources read September 2026: Amazon’s Onsite Commission Income statement (Tables A and B), its Earning Onsite Commissions help page, the standard commission table, the April 2026 agreement changes and the Influencer Program Policy.

The rate card nobody reads

Search for Amazon commission rates and you get the standard Associates table: 10% luxury beauty, 4.50% physical books, 4.00% for everything uncategorised. That table governs traffic you send to Amazon. It never mentions onsite earnings at all.

Those live in a separate document, the Onsite Commission Income statement, which publishes two rate tables — one headed as the fixed onsite rates excluding Creator Ads, the other the rates for Creator Ads. They are not close to each other.

All fifteen figures are Amazon’s own, read September 2026 from the two documents linked above. Both onsite tables are considerably longer than this extract; these are the rows that bear on the rest of the page.

This is where the circulating numbers go wrong. The onsite rate tables reproduced on several comparison sites carry Table B’s figures — books at 2.25%, televisions at 1.00%, catch-all at 2.00% — as a single “onsite” column with no mention of Creator Ads. If you publish an ordinary shoppable video that Amazon surfaces on a product page, Table A applies, and on books it pays less than a quarter of what those pages show.

Amazon hides neither table; both sit in the same public statement. But its own help page points elsewhere, saying only that “You can find the onsite rates in Associates Central” — behind a login — while the rates are published openly, in a document filed under commission income rather than under the Influencer Program.

Where books land

The row that matters for this site’s readers is physical books, and it is the worst-treated category we compared: 4.50% to 0.50% is a 9x gap, an 88.9% cut. Books sit in Table A’s bottom band, alongside televisions, toys, PC components and grocery. Set the cuts side by side and the popular shorthand falls apart:

• Luxury beauty: 10.00% to 4.00% — a 60.0% cut
• Kitchen and automotive: 4.50% to 1.25% — 72.2%
• Televisions and all other categories: 75.0%
• Physical books: 4.50% to 0.50% — 88.9%

The commonly repeated line that onsite rates are “about 50% lower” is shallower than every one of those. The real range is 60% to 88.9%, and because it varies this much by category, any single multiplier is the wrong tool — you have to look up your own row.

Two narrowings that multiply

The rate is only half of it. On 14 April 2026 Amazon changed what a purchase has to be before the onsite rate is applied at all, recording it as an “Updated calculation of onsite commission income to apply only to Direct Qualifying Purchases of the same ASIN variant as the linked Product detail page”.

Offsite, the old arrangement still runs: a click gives you a session covering “any qualifying items placed in a customer’s Shopping Cart within 24 hours”. Onsite, since April, you are paid on the exact item and nothing else in the basket. Our page on the April 2026 Associates changes covers why that rule is scoped to onsite content and leaves ordinary blog links alone.

So two things narrowed independently, and they compound. Take the illustration this site already uses: a reader engages with a $15 physical book and also buys a $1,200 television.

Our arithmetic on Amazon’s published rates. The $15 and $1,200 figures are an illustration carried over from our Associates page so the two are directly comparable; substitute your own. The offsite row assumes the television is bought in the same 24-hour session, which is what Amazon’s session rule allows rather than what any particular reader does.

Decomposed, the gap is two clean multipliers. Narrowing attribution from the cart to the linked item alone takes $24.68 down to $0.68 — a factor of 36.6. Then swapping the standard book rate for the onsite one takes $0.68 to $0.075 — a factor of 9. Together that is 329x for the same customer buying the same two things.

Put in terms of the payout threshold, one offsite session like that clears Amazon’s $10 direct-deposit minimum on its own. The same sale onsite would need to happen 134 times. We cover the thresholds themselves on our creator payout thresholds page.

None of which makes Amazon’s position unreasonable, and it states the rationale plainly: “As you didn’t directly drive that customer to Amazon to shop, but influenced them to purchase once they were there, we compensate you for the purchase but at an onsite rate.” Paying less for a customer you did not bring is defensible. The point is the magnitude, which almost nobody quotes, and the fact that the two changes stack.

Two Store IDs, two tax registrations

The most reassuring thing Amazon publishes here is worth stating plainly, because the opposite is widely assumed: joining does not touch what your own site earns. Amazon says the Onsite Store ID “does not affect or change your rates for traffic you send to Amazon”, that “Onsite earnings are not inclusive of any traffic that you send directly to Amazon or your storefront”, and that “You will continue to earn your standard influencer commission rates and attribution for traffic you drive.” The onsite statement protects the other direction too: a session under it “will not override a Session resulting from traffic directed to the Amazon Site from a Special Link outside of the Amazon Site”.

What it does add is administrative. If you are in the Influencer Program “you were automatically assigned an Onsite Store ID”, separate from your Associates ID, and it must be set up for payment independently: “we do not transfer it from one Store ID to another so each Store ID requires you input your tax info in order to be paid.” That is a second tax registration for the same person, and our guide to creator tax forms covers why the threshold that applies depends on how the payer classifies the money rather than on the total. Onsite IDs are country-scoped too: “content must be published in the specific country in order to be eligible to earn onsite in that country.”

What the storefront costs you

Eligibility is the part every guide quantifies and Amazon does not. The Influencer Program Policy says only that an eligible Associate “must meet Amazon qualitative and quantitative thresholds, complete the registration process, and comply with the applicable provisions” — confirming that quantitative thresholds exist while publishing none. The 1,000-follower minimum and the 5,000 figure for Instagram that circulate widely appear on no Amazon page we could read, and the two lists we found of qualifying platforms did not agree with each other.

What the policy does spell out is what you are agreeing to, and three clauses are worth reading before building on a storefront. Registration requires “granting requests to access data regarding your social media presences”. You do not own the storefront: you “do not, by virtue of the Associates Program Operating Agreement or otherwise, acquire any ownership interest or rights in or to, the Influencer Page, the Influencer Page URL”. And Amazon reserves the right to determine all aspects of that page, including the display of “advertising materials on the Influencer Page, without compensation to Influencer” — adverts on your storefront, sold by Amazon, paying you nothing.

Those three quotes are from the Amazon.in version of the Influencer Program Policy. The Amazon.com copy returned HTTP 400 on every URL form we tried, so we have quoted the version that renders and flagged it rather than assuming the US wording is identical.

There is also no switch for onsite featuring. Amazon’s only stated remedy if you would rather your content were not used is that “you can remove content from your storefront” — which also removes it from the storefront you built it for.

What we would actually do

Treat onsite as a rebate on content you were making anyway, not a revenue line you can plan. On Table A rates and same-ASIN attribution the honest expectation for a book-shaped catalogue is very small numbers, and 134 qualifying sales to clear a $10 payout is the figure to hold in your head before anyone talks you into a shoppable-video workflow.

Do it anyway if you already film, because it costs nothing to add and Amazon says plainly it cannot cannibalise your referral earnings. Do not restructure a content business around it. And if your category is one where the gap is narrow — luxury beauty loses 60% rather than 88.9% — the sums are genuinely different, which is the argument for looking up your own row rather than trusting any summary, including this one.

The wider pattern is one this site keeps meeting: the rate card that decides what a business pays is routinely the hardest document to find. Associates keeps your negotiated rates behind a login, and the table governing the Influencer Program is filed away from that programme’s own help pages, which point you at a logged-in screen instead.

What we could not verify

• The US Influencer Program Policy. Every amazon.com URL form we tried returned HTTP 400. The eligibility, data-access, ownership and advertising quotes above are from the Amazon.in copy, which renders in full. We have not confirmed the US wording matches.
• Any follower threshold. Amazon states that quantitative thresholds exist and publishes no number. Every figure in circulation is third-party, and we have repeated none of them as fact.
• Which platforms qualify. Two sources we read gave different lists — one naming four platforms, another five including Pinterest. No Amazon page we could read enumerates them, so this page names none.
• What Amazon counts as Creator Ads. Table B applies to them and the statement does not define them in the document we read, so we cannot tell you how to qualify for the better table — only that it exists and that it is conditional.
• The minimum view period for video. Amazon pays video onsite commissions after a customer “has viewed a minimum period (as determined by Amazon)”. That period is not published.
• Everything about practice. We do not hold a storefront. We have not seen a real onsite statement, cannot say how often Amazon selects content, and state no earnings figure for anyone.

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