What is Commission?
Internet Marketing Dictionary | Affiliate Commission

If you sell a product as an affiliate you earn a commission on the sale. This can range literally from a figure as low as 1% right up to 100%!

The commission rate you earn per sale will depend in part on the nature of the product you are selling and in general information products pay a much higher commission than physical products because they are cheap to produce and distribute.

Many internet marketers earn very high amounts of commission: many thousands of dollars a month. They usually do this on the back of a good quality emailing list coupled with an autoresponder.

A typical commission rate on an information product will be 50% but it does vary according to the quality of the product, the generosity of the product owner and the competence of the internet marketer. Highly effective internet marketers - so called Super Affiliates - can request and get higher commissions than other people because of their ability to sell a lot of products fast.

One issue with commissions is how they are paid. Some systems such as Clickbank automatically calculate and pay commmissions to affiliates. Other systems like PayDotCom calculate commissions automatically but don't process payments relying instead on the product owner to make payments manually via a payment system such as PayPal.

As an internet marketer you need to ensure that you get paid commissions due to you and to check whether you are getting what you have earned it is preferable to have access to a reliable reporting system. Many marketers however just rely on trust on the basis that word would soon get round if a marketer failed to pay commissions due.