Amazon Saudi Arabia Affiliate Program
- March 19, 2024
On June 17th, 2020, we were excited to learn that Amazon had expanded its global presence again and not only launched a new storefront but also an additional Amazon affiliate program.
Let’s take a deep dive into everything you need to know about The Amazon Saudi Arabia Affiliate Program!
Amazon.sa was launched to support shoppers in Saudi Arabia and is a replacement for Souq.com that Amazon bought approximately three years ago for $580M USD.
This makes the 18th independent Amazon storefront worldwide now and the third in the Middle East (Amazon.ae and Amazon.tr being the other two).
What really caught our attention though was that Amazon, once again, rolled out their super popular affiliate program on the same day as the launch of the storefront and marketplace. The Amazon Saudi Arabia Affiliate Program is now the 17th independent affiliate program and the fourth in a row where the affiliate program was launched in tandem with the storefront (technically its the 18th affiliate program but the Amazon affiliate program for Turkey is currently private so we aren’t counting it).
Join us learning how to sign up and how to use the Amazon Saudi Arabia affiliate program, how to identify an Amazon.sa affiliate link, what the Amazon.sa affiliate program commissions are and how their payout compares.
Amazon Saudi Arabia (Amazon.sa)
Coming from the Souq.com acquisition in March of 2017, and a year after the Amazon.ae storefront was launched (with an affiliate program), the Middle East sees the new face of the prominent e-retailer of the region.
The Amazon.sa storefront packs quite a punch, advertising millions of products from local and international businesses across 21 categories, including the staples of electronics, books, and home. Also, there is a “Global Store” category that mentions “millions of items from Amazon US” listed in local currency and language making the Amazon.sa store the preferred shopping destination for Saudi Arabia residents.
The site is available in both English and Arabic and offers products for sale in Saudi Riyals (SAR).
Amazon.sa is making the transition as easy as possible for previous Souq.com customers as all the old credentials, orders, delivery addresses, payment methods, and support queries were converted over to the new storefront.
Taking a page out of the original Amazon.com playbook, Amazon.sa shoppers have access to free next day delivery on orders above Saudi riyals 200. Also, there is also the option of same-day delivery to select areas across the kingdom.
While these key aspects of delivery are already available, Amazon is ramping up their local logistics and operations network to ensure quick delivery across the nation. Today Amazon.sa operates three fulfillment centers and 11 delivery stations in the country, staffed by 1,400, with approximately 40% of the workforce in the Jeddah facility being women.
The Amazon Saudi Arabia Affiliate Program
The new Amazon affiliate program for Saudi Arabia also goes by the name “Amazon Associates” and, as expected, is a nearly perfect cookie-cutter replica of the other 16 Amazon affiliate programs. There are some minor nuances that we’ve outlined below.
Amazon.sa Affiliate Program Signup
The signup and login for The Amazon Saudi Arabia Affiliate Program can be found at https://affiliate-program.amazon.sa/ or by clicking on the country flag/name from any of the other Amazon Associates Central dashboards.
Most important, the signup for the Amazon Saudi Arabia Affiliate Program appears to be open to creators, publishers, and affiliates worldwide (unlike the Amazon Netherlands affiliate program for example) though there are minor limitations on what countries they can payout affiliate commissions to (more on that later).
The signup process takes the same four-step process the other Amazon affiliate programs follow, which includes providing Account Information, sharing the sites and social media channels you plan to share Amazon affiliate links from, providing some information about your profile (that includes questions about site/channel, size, focus topics, traffic generation methods, etc.) and finally presenting you with an affiliate tracking ID specific for you and the Amazon.sa affiliate program.
Just like the other Amazon affiliate programs worldwide, Amazon reviews your account after you’ve generated three “qualified” sales and your account will be auto expired if you aren’t able to do this within 180 days. On this note, we do not recommend signing up for the Amazon Saudi Arabia Affiliate Program if you aren’t getting at least 100 clicks per month from Saudi Arabia as your time would likely be best spent elsewhere.
The signup process shouldn’t take you more than 20 minutes, and if this isn’t your first rodeo you should be able to complete it in about 10 minutes max.
Affiliate Program Payment Method
While not as open-ended as some of the other international Amazon affiliate programs, The Amazon Saudi Arabia Affiliate Program does provide everyone’s favorite option of the three – direct deposit. They don’t currently appear to have the option to pay out by check or gift certificates.
Again, not as open-ended as some of the other affiliate programs, the Saudi Arabia program pays out via direct deposit locally, to Saudi Arabia based bank accounts, as well as to bank accounts based in Singapore, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
While that makes it easy for those of you who have a bank on one of those countries, the addition of the US also makes it possible to collect commissions from Amazon Saudi Arabia by leveraging the awesome services of Payoneer (Our love for Payoneer, and how to use Payoneer, is elaborated on here).
Amazon.sa Affiliate Program Commission Rates
The Amazon.sa affiliate program commission rates follow the “Fixed Fee for Specific Product Categories” format that Amazon.com adopted in March of 2017, and is not currently using the Qualified / Non-Qualified purchase format that the European Amazon Associates programs are now using.
The published commission rates for the launch of the Amazon Saudi Arabia Affiliate Program (June 17th, 2020) are as follows:
You’ll notice that for the last category in each row, with one exception, shows up as the first item in the second row implying that Shoes, Automotive, Tools, and Toys are paid two different rates.
Minus those four duplicates, there are 32 different product categories paying out between 2 and 8%.
Broken down and compared to the current Amazon.com / US affiliate commission rates you’ll find that 24 categories pay a higher percentage rate, two are the same, and six pay less than their US counterparts.
Most notably is that the catch-all “All Other Categories” payout for Saudi Arabia is twice as high, at 8%, as the US at 4%.
| Product Category | Saudi Arabia | United States | Difference |
| Health & Personal Care | 7.00% | 1.00% | 6.00% |
| Personal Care Appliances | 7.00% | 1.00% | 6.00% |
| Apparel | 9.00% | 4.00% | 5.00% |
| Luggage | 9.00% | 4.00% | 5.00% |
| Shoes | 9.00% | 4.00% | 5.00% |
| Baby | 7.00% | 3.00% | 4.00% |
| Music Instruments | 7.00% | 3.00% | 4.00% |
| Sports | 7.00% | 3.00% | 4.00% |
| All Other Categories | 8.00% | 4.00% | 4.00% |
| Jewelry | 8.00% | 4.00% | 4.00% |
| Shoes | 8.00% | 4.00% | 4.00% |
| Watch | 8.00% | 4.00% | 4.00% |
| Book / ebooks | 8.00% | 4.50% | 3.50% |
| Stamps Collectibles | 7.00% | 4.00% | 3.00% |
| Grocery | 4.00% | 1.00% | 3.00% |
| Automotive | 7.00% | 4.50% | 2.50% |
| Furniture | 5.00% | 3.00% | 2.00% |
| Music | 5.00% | 3.00% | 2.00% |
| Tools | 5.00% | 3.00% | 2.00% |
| Gift Card | 2.00% | 0.00% | 2.00% |
| Home | 4.00% | 3.00% | 1.00% |
| Office Products | 5.00% | 4.00% | 1.00% |
| Outdoor | 4.00% | 3.00% | 1.00% |
| Pet Products | 4.00% | 3.00% | 1.00% |
| Tools | 4.00% | 3.00% | 1.00% |
| Toys | 4.00% | 3.00% | 1.00% |
| Automotive | 5.00% | 4.50% | 0.50% |
| Major Appliances | 4.00% | 4.00% | 0.00% |
| Video Games | 2.00% | 2.00% | 0.00% |
| PC Store | 2.00% | 2.50% | -0.50% |
| Toys | 2.00% | 3.00% | -1.00% |
| Camera | 2.00% | 4.00% | -2.00% |
| Electronics / Mobile Electronics | 2.00% | 4.00% | -2.00% |
| Wireless / Wireless Accessory | 2.00% | 4.00% | -2.00% |
| Beauty / Luxury beauty | 7.00% | 10.00% | -3.00% |
| Video | 2.00% | 5.00% | -3.00% |
Note, the four categories that showed up twice are listed above with a strikeout for the lower rate (in hopes that they actually belong in the higher category and it was a typo that they ended up in the lower category).
How To Identify An Amazon.sa Affiliate Link
Affiliate links for Amazon Saudi Arabia Affiliate Program follow the same format as Amazon affiliate programs across Europe and the Middle East with the key of “tag=” followed by a string of characters that end with “-21”. For example geniuslink02-21.
https://www.amazon.sa/-/en/dp/B07D8WPL3W/?tag=geniuslink02-21
Amazon Affiliate Product Advertising API for Saudi Arabia
Similar to the near-perfect rollouts we’ve seen of the Amazon Netherlands, Amazon Singapore and Amazon United Arab Emirates affiliate programs, the support for the product advertising API is a bit delayed. Currently, the v5 PA API Scratchpad doesn’t show support for the Amazon Saudi Arabia endpoint.
Amazon Onelink + Amazon Saudi Arabia
Just like with many of the other new Associate’s programs (India, Mexico, Australia, Brazil, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, and the Netherlands) Amazon’s affiliate link translation tool, OneLink, does not support Amazon.sa.
Therefore, if you are using OneLink, then the Amazon.sa links posted to your site won’t be localized for any international traffic, and when Amazon.com (or elsewhere) links are clicked from Saudi Arabia, they won’t redirect to Amazon.sa.
Geniuslink + Amazon Saudi Arabia
Support for a new Amazon storefront comes in two pieces with Geniuslink. The first being “auto-affiliation”, the process of taking a raw link and converting it into an affiliate link.
This means you only need to add your affiliate tracking ID into the Geniuslink dashboard once and all of your links running through our service will be affiliated. Auto-affiliation support for the Amazon Saudi Arabia Affiliate Program should be live on the Geniuslink system by July 1st, 2020.
The second stage of support on Geniuslink is our industry-leading link translation.
However, this requires access to the Amazon Product Advertising API (PA API). So without PA API endpoint is available for the Amazon.sa storefront, we are not yet able to provide the auto-magic link translation for any other Amazon product link to the correct product in the Amazon.sa store for clicks originating from Saudi Arabia. We’ve already reached out to our Amazon Associates contacts to start working on ensuring we get that access as soon as possible.
We can’t wait!
However, if you can’t wait either and already see significant traffic from Saudi Arabia, then you may want to take power into your own hands with an “Advanced” link built in the Geniuslink dashboard.
By creating a rule for Saudi Arabia traffic and manually providing an Amazon.sa URL as the destination, you ensure that your visitors from Saudi Arabia are getting the best treatment possible and that you’re earning your affiliate commissions.
Conclusion
Once again, it’s exciting to see Amazon continue to expand its international footprint and roll out new storefronts around the world and not ignore their affiliate program in the process.
We enjoy watching them grow because it generates opportunities for content creators around the world as well. The continued focus on the Middle East is particularly interesting as it seems to be an area ripe for disruption from e-commerce.
It’s always fun to see what Amazon cooks up next!
It will be interesting to witness what other parts of the world become available to affiliate marketers interested in generating revenue from recommending quality products.
Please let us know in the comments below any questions you have or any observations we may have missed.
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