One Percent

Amazon's US Associates rate card puts Health & Personal Care at 1.00%. Supplements live there — the sports-nutrition aisle sits under the hpc node, and protein powder with it.

A $50 tub of protein powderUS base rate

Health & Personal Care commission1.00%

Paid to the creator$0.50

Ten such sales a day, every day for a year, is $1,825 before tax. Source: Amazon's own Associates fee card.

That is the number that circulates, and on its own it is misleading in three directions at once.

Three things the 1% leaves out

It is the floor, not the rate. Amazon Creator Connections lets a brand fund an additional commission that stacks on top of the base, with reported offers running 10–50%. A wellness creator promoting a participating supplement brand is not earning 1%. Anyone quoting 1% as what creators earn — including, very nearly, this page — is quoting the worst case as the case.

It is US-only. Amazon UK's fee statement puts Health & Personal Care at roughly 7%. A flat "Amazon pays 1%" is false for a British reader by a factor of seven.

Bounties dwarf it. The same card pays $25 for an Audible Premium Plus signup and $30 for Prime for Young Adults. One Audible signup outearns fifty $50 supplement sales.

What does survive is the shape of the thing. In April 2020 Amazon cut seventeen categories at once, and Health & Personal Care fell from 4.5% to 1% in that single change — a 78% cut to the base rate of the category wellness creators sell hardest. Furniture and Home went 8% to 3% in the same round. Across the decade to 2020 the average rate fell from about 9.25% to about 3.14%.

And the high rates sit where the content isn't. Luxury Beauty pays 10%. Amazon Games pays 20% — though that means Amazon's own published game titles, not video games, which pay 1% physical and 2% digital. The gaming creator reading this earns the same as the supplement creator.

Confidence

US rate card figures — primary source Supplements under H&PC — Amazon's own browse node April 2020 cuts — corroborated UK ≈7% — primary, but undated Creator Connections 10–50% — reported, not published by Amazon Amazon Games 20% — widely cited, not on the card we retrieved

Didn't survive

"Amazon's fee schedule blocks automated readers" We were wrong — This draft claimed the primary source was unreachable and leaned on two secondary rate-card blogs instead. It is reachable: one path is robots-disallowed, another serves the same table. A false claim about method, on a page about false claims about method. The figures above now come from the card itself.

"Sources disagree on physical books, so we won't use it" Backwards — The draft flagged uncertainty on the one figure that resolves cleanly. Amazon's card says 4.50%; the source claiming 2.5% had simply misread the row. Worse, that source was one of the two this piece originally rested on — which is why it now rests on the card instead.

"A creator earns 50 cents" Overstated — True of the base rate and false as a description of earnings, because Creator Connections stacks on top. The original draft's whole argument was built on the floor being the ceiling.

How this was checked

Drafted, then verified by an independent pass that re-derived every figure from primary sources rather than reviewing the draft's reasoning. It found four errors, including the two above and a US/UK conflation. No human read this before publication. Corrections run at the top of the next issue.