How do I earn more from the same clicks on my affiliate links?

Say you feature a jacket and find it in two shops. A pays 10% commission but costs €10 more net and only has S and XL left. B pays 7%, is cheaper and has every size. All figures are made up for the example, not any shop’s actual terms. Net means excluding VAT and shipping. Under its policies, the Amazon Associates programme, for example, calculates commission on the amounts Amazon actually receives, minus shipping costs and taxes.

The higher rate loses because more than twice as many people buy at B. As a formula: EPC = pay per click + conversion rate × net order value × commission rate × (1 − share of returns and cancellations). The conversion rate is the share of clicks that lead to a sale. For B that gives 0 + 1.5% × €90 × 7% × 0.7, which rounds to 6.6 cents. The 30% for returns and cancellations is deliberately high: according to Bitkom, online shoppers in Germany send back 11% of their online purchases on average.

Because EPC is worked out per click, you can use it to compare products and shops with very different reach. It also shows where the work pays off. Say you lift a product with 2,000 clicks a month from 3 to 6 cents: that is €60 more a month from the same number of clicks.

The programmes themselves show how far rates differ. The Amazon Associates fee schedule for amazon.de lists 6% for clothing and accessories, 4% for beauty and 1% for groceries, plus current special rates, for example for bounty events, special offers and promotions. According to LTK’s FAQ, brands there usually offer 10 to 25%. On Amazon the rate can also differ when a sale is indirect, meaning the product comes from a different category than the product page you linked to. If your link doesn’t lead to a product page, Amazon treats all sales from it as indirect.

How long a click counts is set by each programme, and the window is often called the cookie duration. Under the Amazon Associates policies, the session after a click ends after 24 hours at most. Anything added to the basket in that time can count for up to 89 days after the click.

Even with pay per click, only clicks the programme accepts as valid are paid. Stylink’s terms (August 2026, § 3), for example, don’t count clicks caused by so-called clickbait as genuine clicks. To avoid this, they ask creators to include product photos and details such as the product name in the post.

For your EPC this means two things. If the shop you linked to is more expensive than others, some of your community keep looking and order elsewhere, usually without your link. And even after the sale, a better price elsewhere can still cost you commission if the goods go back because of it.

In the same Bitkom survey, 67% named a size that didn’t fit as a reason for returns, for example with clothing or furniture, and 41% a product that didn’t match the picture or description online. With fashion, that means anything that prevents a wrong purchase also lifts your EPC. Say which size you wear and how the item fits, and show the shade in daylight. Returns usually don’t affect pay per click.

1. Take the figures for the last full month and work out the EPC for every product with enough clicks: earnings divided by clicks. For products that pay per sale, enough means, for example, a few hundred clicks or several sales; otherwise combine several months. Say your conversion rate is 1%: 50 clicks then bring half a sale on average, and chance decides if there is one.
2. Work out your average, meaning your total earnings divided by all your clicks. If you feature both very cheap and very expensive products, work it out per price range. A €5 lip balm will hardly reach the EPC of a €100 jacket on commission per sale, even if everything else is right.
3. For every product below the average, work out the gap: clicks × (average − the product’s EPC). Say a product has 800 clicks and an EPC of 2 cents, and your average is 5 cents: it is €24 a month short.
4. Take the three products with the biggest gap and go through the levers in the table. Sometimes a shop that stocks the product for less and in all sizes is enough, or a link that goes straight to the variant you showed.
5. Change one thing per product at a time, note the date and compare one full month before with one after. Until the commission is confirmed, clicks and sales show you the direction. For the comparison in euros, use confirmed commission, because pending commission can still be lost to returns.

wyrld works on the price lever: your community sees the offers wyrld found with prices side by side and buys where they like, directly from the shop and at no extra cost. The cheapest new offer is labelled “Best price”. So anyone who finds one offer too expensive doesn’t have to keep searching, and the offers in the price comparison run through wyrld and count for your storefront.

To set this up, you paste the link to a product or pick it from the catalogue. wyrld recognises the brand, name and variant, looks for the same item across more than 90,000 partner shops and creates the affiliate link for each offer it finds, without you signing up with any network. Depending on the shop, you earn per click, per sale or both. You can see what a product earns you in your dashboard, where you follow your clicks and commission live and can work out your EPC. Commission is paid on the net value after returns and cancellations and settled at the start of the following month with a Gutschrift (self-billing credit note).

If you work with an agency, it gets its own dashboard on wyrld, maintains your storefront with you and sees the same figures. So you can go through the five steps above together. wyrld deducts the commission share you agree on from your earnings when it settles, and your agency receives its own credit note. wyrld is free for creators, and the creator terms do not require exclusivity: as far as wyrld is concerned, your links on LTK, Stylink or Amazon can stay. What your other programmes allow is set out in their own terms.