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Overall: 
First, the good news. Amazon.com is an incredible retailing machine, a company that sells more than one million products and is one of the strongest brands in the entire world. Next, the not-so-good news for Amazon.com affiliates: the program can be hard to manage on a technical level, the commission rates are infinitesimal in most cases, and the affiliate support is minimal. Another potential drawback to being an Amazon.com affiliate is that this company is firmly in the crosshairs of state and local governments that want to collect more sales tax; for example, Amazon.com affiliates in California were de-activated by Amazon.com when California tried to charge sales tax on sales generated by CA affiliates. The California law was later repealed and Cali-based Amazon.com affiliates have now been re-enrolled, but you get the idea here: affiliates under the wing of Amazon.com have no chance to fly under the radar.
Ease of Use: 
Amazon.com has some awesome tools for affiliates that go far beyond banner ads. The Amazon.com affiliate platform allows affiliates to link to any page within Amazon.com and graphically display individual products within your own content. So for instance, if you want to showcase a particular book instead of just a generic Amazon.com link, you can do that. You can even have an Amazon.com “mini-store” on your website. For example, if you want to promote books about skin care, Amazon.com can give you a little widget that you put on your website to show only books on that topic. All of this is great. It’s not that easy to use and maintain, though.
Reputation/Security: 
What more could you want from a company in the reputation/security department? The brand recognition of Amazon.com is outstanding in every way. The innovation shown by Amazon.com is terrific and constantly ongoing. The security technologies used by Amazon.com were, many of them, either invented or perfected by Amazon.com. When it comes to reputation and security, there is no better affiliate partner than Amazon.com.
Customer Service: 
Affiliate support for the Amazon.com affiliate program is weak, and with good reason. Amazon.com has thousands of affiliates and no problem marketing itself in other ways. In short, affiliates are not nearly as important to the success of Amazon.com as many Amazon.com affiliates might like to think. This is not to say that Amazon.com provides no support for affiliates, but be prepared to encounter the recommendation to "consult with your webmaster" as the proposed solution to a variety of technical challenges experienced by affiliates. Such advice isn’t much help for newbie affiliates who don’t have an on-call webmaster. On the upside, Amazon.com does provide affiliates with extensive and professional written FAQ pages and technical manuals, giving persistent affiliates the ability to solve their own problems…after much trial and error.
Commission Rate: 
Amazon.com pays "up to" 15 percent commission on items purchased from Amazon.com for any traffic you send their way. The "up to" clause is a key one because commission rates actually start at 4 percent, i.e. 60 cents commission on a $15 book. You can then move up the commission rate ladder based on how many sales you create each month. Someday you may be able to make $1.28 per book. Amazon publishes a full description of their commission rates under the "Associates Compensation Overview." There you’ll see that the 15 percent rate, which is already extremely low by affiliate marketing standards, is only for a very few product types, such as those to be found at the Amazon.com luxury brand MyHabit.com. For "general products," such as books, you need to create 3,000+ sales per month to rise up to the top 8.5 percent commission rate available for most products. Good luck with that!
Ease of Commission Payment:
Assuming that you are able to earn enough commissions to meet the $10 monthly payment minimum, Amazon.com affiliates can choose to be paid via direct deposit, to an Amazon.com gift card, or you can pay a $15 fee to receive a check. Oh, and they also pay 60 days late. So for example, your commissions from January will be paid in March. We love that.
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