Commissions vary widely from affiliate scheme to affiliate scheme. The most common idea is to pay the affiliate commission as a percentage of the total sale price. This can be as little as 1% and as much as 100%.

Yes, some products pay you 100% commission – and you might be wondering why this is the case. The simple answer of course is that the product owner wants to make their affiliate scheme very attractive to potential affiliates so that he or she can persuade as many people as possible to promote it. By offering 100% commission on a low-priced front end product they will be able to get lots of affiliates on board and thus drive lots of people into their sales funnel. They’ll ultimately earn more money by making lots of sales of their back end products. Typically it works like this. They have a low priced product for sale on the front end - let’s say it’s an eBook or short report priced at $4.95.

They offer people 100% commission on this product, but then when people actually buy it they will also see other ‘back end’ products that are priced at a higher level. These will either pay a lower commission to affiliates (e.g. 40%) or even no commission at all… The product owner knows that by offering 100% commission on the front end product they will ultimately make more money because their affiliates will drive much more traffic into their sales funnel than if they were, say, offering 50% on the front end product. They make no money upfront (and even lose money in some cases) but the extra income they make on the backend ultimately earns them more money.