Broken promises and Secrets From Amazon Influencer Program

I am a person who is always on the lookout for new opportunities to help advance myself financially and education-wise. It is very fulfilling to learn something new and succeed. That's why when I stumbled upon the Amazon influencer program in 2020, I was highly intrigued because this was something that was very new and is now, in 2024, being duplicated by many other companies.

In a nutshell, I entered into the Amazon Influencer program with so much support from a designated manager who was able to assist me through my journey with clear intentions for my success, insightful information, and very transparent about how things would work regarding my content being uploaded, and with enticing high-income offers based upon higher commission rates.

In February 2024, all of that has been washed away because it never mattered from the beginning!

Let me explain

When I started the program, I was excited to see what it was about and if I could actually make money from uploading videos. Since I was doing this already for YouTube. I soaked up as much knowledge about the program as possible from internal links and saved the best ones for reference. After uploading just a handful of videos and watching my commissions increase week after week, I was ecstatic because this was literally a game changer. After 2 months of consistent growth, I became hyper-focused on how to make money with this program.

I put in the time and effort to educate myself and just go full throttle with uploading and getting products, and my income increased substantially in under a year. I made more money that first year than I did working a regular job where I bust my ass every single day to get up and work hard and deal with workplace drama. I did a handful of livestreams just to experience it and see what it was all about. I made a few sales, but I didn't enjoy it from day one. Now here is where I got sucked into believing they actually cared. Entering my second year as an Amazon Influencer, I received an email from the Amazon Live team offering me an opportunity to earn more income just by going Live.

I was offered an additional commission incentive because they really wanted to get more people streaming. From my research, I knew this to be true since Amazon attempted similar programs in the past, and it failed. I knew Amazon would do all it could, even throwing money at me and others to make this program succeed. I was right, and they are still doing this in 2024. I was like, well, they're offering, I'm going to take it, but I made it clear I'm not sure about streaming and voiced my challenges and dislikes. I was assured support from my assigned manager and a Discord group to ask questions, get helpful information from other A-listers, and talk directly to the Amazon live team when issues arose.

Quickly I realized I did not like livestreaming and found the process annoying and stressful. Around this time, I realized the "mandated investment" needed to succeed in live streaming. I was not interested in buying products constantly in the 'hopes' of making my money back through commission income. Because returning all your purchases wasn't an option if you wanted to keep your Amazon account.

I felt like a person between a rock and a hard place because I didn't want to lose the opportunity to make a lot more money just by doing a simple live stream, yet I honestly, in my heart, despised live streams and didn't want to constantly look for or buy stuff I didn't want or need just to go Live.

It just did not mesh well with me as a person, and I stopped. Becoming an A-lister through Amazon Livestream meant I was initially assigned an awesome manager. I always had communications through email. The exchange was so great, helpful, and very encouraging. I also was able to get an understanding of the program because I still had so many questions that nobody seemed to want to ask because they were so infatuated with the money they were earning nothing else mattered to anyone at that moment.

Towards the end of 2021, the beginning of 2022, my manager, who was so great and awesome, sent me an email to say that the program has now shifted. I was going to be assigned a different person as Amazon decided to switch their staff around to focus on the individuals who made Amazon the most money. Again, this was not stated to me, but I realized this very quickly when I started to see people talk about who their manager was and saw the amount of sales and activity they were getting being a part of the program from social posts. The person I was assigned to was someone who should not have been granted that position!

When I stopped doing live streams, I received an email from my new manager, and I voiced my frustrations and the barriers I was facing. I was offered new ideas and given inside advice based on what Amazon wanted to see from streamers. I realized I didn't mesh well with live streaming. I was best suited for Youtube. I entered the Influencer program as a DIYer, and the audience on Amazon didn't care for DIYs during live streams. I was encouraged to do more of them since it was different, but the audience wasn't interested.

This was noticed by my views and lack of conversions. I accepted that and focused more on Amazon videos, photos, and affiliate links. I would email the new manager with questions, and my emails would go unanswered for weeks. I complained to my old manager and was able to get a response, but I was again not getting responses from other emails. I decided to browse the A-lister discord group and realized I wasn't alone. Many of them had new managers, and their emails also went unanswered.

Another big issue was income transparency.

When you made sales during your live stream, you had no way to see those exact numbers shown on your commission report before they sent you your earnings. It would be a mashup of the live stream, onsight commissions, and all other commissions earned totaled together. I didn't like that because I essentially had to trust that Amazon was fairly paying me all of my money owed from live streams.

I would see random addition commission lines on my income report months later, and when I inquired what they were, I was told it was a correction from income not given for previous months' live streams. Still, I had no breakdown to know if this number was accurate or short as well.

Now let's recap my experience so far. Shall we

1. When I first joined the program, I was under the impression that I would have to do everything on my own and that I would have to work hard to succeed.

2. That changed when I was approached by the Amazon live team. Accepting their deal gave me more money opportunities, but by becoming an A-lister, I would get access to a manager whose job was to help me succeed in the program and provide me with helpful advice to help me grow.

3. Then the Live program metrics changed, and all the advice and support started to go away, becoming non-existent.

Now let's continue, shall we?

At this point of my journey in the program, I realized shoppable videos and photos are much faster and more enjoyable than live streams. I was still receiving emails about upcoming livestream special events that I could potentially show up for on the Amazon live home page and a discounted product list from brands wanting their products featured.

Once again, the buy more things I didn't need or want to have my livestream be shown was dangled in my face, but I made it clear to myself that I was not going to buy products that I did not need or want just to do a live stream so I completely ignored those and they eventually stop sending them to me.

By this time, I was very frustrated, and I had just completely deleted the live stream app from my phone and had not done another live stream since 2022. I want to say in the middle or the end of 2022 or the beginning of 2023, I received another email about another change in how they were going to update/remove the special commission offers for those who had accepted the terms a few years ago, but it never stated if mine was still active or not.

I was tempted to do a live stream to see if I could earn the amount that was agreed upon initially, but I will not resort to doing things I have no interest or joy in just to earn money. I did that when I was working for other people, but I didn't want to do it working for myself. As of February 2024, the discord group created for those individuals known as A-listers via Amazon Live is no longer available to me. The Discord group has been deleted, or they just kicked me out because I had no activity. Which is fine with me.

Amazon went from being transparent to secrets.

In the beginning, Amazon was very transparent about how our videos would be placed and provided helpful information for those who took the time to read to help us succeed.  All of that information is now deleted! Especially the page regarding video placement. Many other once-transparent and now-guarded secrets are no longer available, and we are just wondering what will come in the future.  After some research, I found many individuals who focused on doing live streams for Amazon, left the program, or stopped doing live streams altogether.

However, I do want to point out that those who were able (in their own right) to build a following and attract attention to their lives are thriving, and Amazon (in my opinion) still supports them because they are bringing them in big sums of money.

This is how business works!

By the year 2023, that's when I really started to see a lot of banners of famous people or trendy people appear all over Amazon.com. This fed into my theory that Amazon used us as pawns to help get the program popular to some degree with promises of money and success. Then, once the program got to a certain point, the ones who were supported in the beginning were replaced and essentially erased.

The lure of making money easily by uploading videos to Amazon and getting them placed in the bottom carousel has now been ripped from under us as the carousels are now removed from 90% of all listings. The quick and easy money that was once a reality has now become a fallacy.

This is just business, nothing personal!

Now, by the end of 2023, all of the commissions will have become much lower, the bottom carousel will have been removed, and the transparency of how your videos will appear will be more murky than they were before. This program has become what I feel it always was going to be but was never revealed until Amazon got what it wanted!

If all this happened, why would you continue participating in a program like this?

It's my main income source at the moment. This is slowly changing, however!  I have already dedicated over 3 years to this program, and I have seen the successes and I have experienced the failures.  I am very observant, and I have noticed another shift in how income is created for those in the program. This is still one of the easiest ways to make money if you find a way to work the new normal to your advantage.

That's what I plan to do!

One lesson I have learned is to not focus 100% of my time on a single program moving forward and to continue to not reinvest all of my money when it is not necessary.  Affiliate marketing in itself is a very up-and-down type of industry, which I was and still am very new to. I would not tell anyone to avoid the Amazon influence program because it is still simpler to make money than another program.  This is until TikTok happened. Now that is another story for another time. 

I've said all this to say what?!?!?!

I'm a big believer in people learning from other people's experiences to have a better sense of how to navigate and succeed going forward.  Not everything I talked about in the blog post will be something you experience; however, if and when this becomes something you encounter, it would be useful to have some background and knowledge on what you could do differently.

Educate yourself, and don't let the money make you forget that all you are receiving is not guaranteed to be received tomorrow, next month, or next year!