How much do affiliate links pay? The real numbers, by product type

Affiliate links pay a commission each time someone buys through them, and the amount ranges from a few cents to several hundred dollars per sale depending on what you are linking to. Physical products on Amazon pay roughly 1% to 10% of the sale, most retail and beauty networks pay 10% to 30%, and software subscriptions often pay 20% to 30% on a recurring basis that repeats every month the customer stays. So the honest answer to how much affiliate links pay is: it depends far more on what you recommend than on how many followers you have.

That last point trips up most new creators, who assume earnings scale with audience size. They scale with what you sell and how much your audience trusts the recommendation. Here are the real numbers, by product type, and the levers that actually move your total.

How much do affiliate links pay by product type?

Commission rates are set by the merchant or network, not the creator, and they vary enormously by category. This table reflects publicly available rates as of July 2026; verify with each program before you rely on a number. The spread is widest in technology, where how much tech affiliates make works through the gap between gear links and software commissions with published rates.

The spread is the story. A tech creator sending buyers to gadgets on Amazon earns a dollar or two per sale, while the same creator sending buyers to the software those gadgets run earns a recurring commission worth many times more over a year. What you point at decides the paycheck.

The rate is only half of it: attribution window decides whether you get paid at all

A commission rate you never get credited for pays nothing, and this is the lever most creators never look at. Every program attributes a sale to you only if the purchase happens inside its cookie window, and those windows vary from 24 hours to 90 days across programs sitting in the same category. Amazon Associates runs a 24 hour window that only extends to 89 days when the shopper adds the item to a cart. Most SaaS programs run 30 to 90 days. Etsy is reported at 30 days, Wayfair at 7.

Whether that matters depends entirely on how long your audience takes to decide. On short-form video the click and the purchase usually happen in the same sitting, so a 24 hour window costs you almost nothing. On a search or planning surface the gap is weeks, and a short window quietly hands your sales to whoever the buyer clicked most recently before checkout. That is why a 4% program with a 90 day window can out-earn a 10% program with a 24 hour one, and it is the reason we recommend picking affiliate programs for Pinterest by cookie window rather than by rate. B2B software makes the same point more sharply: the median B2B sales cycle is reported at around 84 days, which outlasts the standard 30 day cookie outright.

Before you compare two rate cards, compare the two windows against how your own audience actually buys. It changes the ranking more often than the percentages do.

How much do affiliate marketers make per sale?

Per sale, most affiliate commissions fall between one dollar and a hundred dollars, with the median for consumer products sitting in the low single digits and software and high-ticket digital products at the top end. The average per-sale figure is less useful than it looks, because a single recurring software referral is not really one sale, it is a monthly payment that continues. A creator who makes twenty $2 gadget commissions earns $40 once. A creator who makes twenty $6-per-month software referrals earns $120 in month one and keeps most of it every month after, as long as those customers stay subscribed.

Do affiliate links pay per click or per sale?

The vast majority of affiliate links pay per sale, not per click. You earn only when someone clicks your link and then completes a purchase within the program's cookie window, which can be anywhere from 24 hours on Amazon to 30 days or more elsewhere. A smaller number of programs pay per lead or per free-trial sign-up, and a few pay a flat bounty for a specific action like a software account creation. Pure pay-per-click affiliate deals are rare. This is why conversion matters so much: a link that gets a thousand clicks and no purchases pays nothing, while a link that gets fifty clicks from ready buyers can pay well. Small improvements to how your storefront presents a recommendation, the wording, the layout, the call to action, can lift how many of those clicks turn into sales, and it is worth auditing your page copy and layout if traffic is landing but not converting.

How much do affiliate links pay on Amazon?

Amazon pays on its Associates fee schedule, roughly 1% to 10% depending on category, with electronics and computers near the bottom at about 1% to 4% and some categories like luxury beauty higher. The cookie window is 24 hours, one of the shortest anywhere, though adding an item to the cart extends attribution to 89 days. Amazon's advantage is conversion, because your audience already has an account and a saved card, so a higher share of clicks become sales than on almost any other program. Whether that conversion beats a higher retail rate is the whole argument in Amazon Influencer vs LTK. The disadvantage is the low rate and the fact that Amazon does not sell most software subscriptions, so tech creators recommending SaaS have very little to link to there.

What actually drives how much you earn?

Three levers move your affiliate income far more than follower count does.

• What you recommend. Product category sets the rate and the payout shape. Recommending recurring software instead of one-time gadgets can multiply the lifetime value of a single referral by ten or more.
• Purchase intent of your audience. A review channel whose viewers are actively deciding what to buy converts far better than a general-interest account with more followers. Intent beats reach for affiliate income.
• Whether you capture the moment. If someone takes your recommendation but cannot find the link, you earn nothing. A permanent storefront that holds every recommendation means a purchase decision three weeks later still credits you.

This is the case for building a creator commerce platform presence rather than dropping one-off links: the storefront keeps working after the post scrolls away. Our guide to how many followers you need to make money with affiliate digs into the intent-versus-reach math, and creator affiliate management tools covers reading clicks against commissions so you can tell which of these three levers is actually costing you money.

How much can you make with affiliate links as a creator?

There is no cap and no guarantee, and honest ranges are wide. A creator early on with an engaged niche audience might make a few hundred dollars a month; established creators recommending high-value software with recurring commissions can build that into a primary income. Knowing which of your recommendations actually converts is what moves that number, and it is the job most creators skip: the tracking side of creator affiliate management tools is what turns a year of guessing into a shortlist of things worth repeating. The path there is not more followers, it is recommending things worth real commissions to an audience that trusts you, and capturing every sale in one place. If your content is about AI and software, an AI monetization platform that pays recurring commissions is the difference between earning a dollar per gadget and earning for a year per subscriber.

The short version

Affiliate links pay a commission per sale, from under two dollars on Amazon electronics to $8 to $24 on a beauty order to a recurring $6 or more per month on a software subscription. Most pay per sale within a cookie window, not per click, so conversion and purchase intent matter more than raw reach. The biggest lever is what you recommend: recurring software compounds in a way one-time physical sales never do. See how Favly works to turn your recommendations into a storefront that captures both.