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Ask a room of new affiliates what they’d rather promote — a $500 product or a $59 tool — and most of them will pick the $500 product before you’ve finished the question. Big ticket, big commission, right? Not until you do the commission math.
Do the arithmetic. All of it, not just the price tag.
The only commission math formula that matters
Your commission on any offer is one multiplication:
Price × commission rate = what you actually earn per sale.
Run both offers through it:
- The $500 product at a 3% rate: $500 × 0.03 = $15.00 per sale
- The $59 tool at a 50% rate: $59 × 0.50 = $29.50 per sale
The “small” offer pays almost double per sale. The price tag was five times smaller and the payout is twice as big. Beginners stare at the first number in the equation. Operators stare at the third.
And 3% is not a straw man. On the big general marketplaces, plenty of everyday categories pay low single-digit rates — home, toys, electronics and the like commonly sit in that 2–4.5% range. Meanwhile, digital products — software, tools, lifetime deals — routinely carry rates of 30%, 50%, sometimes more, because the seller’s cost of delivering one more copy is close to zero. The rate is where the leverage is.
Now add the traffic you actually have
Per-sale payout is only half the story. The other half is how many sales your traffic produces, and this is where the expensive product quietly loses again.
Let’s run an honest worked example — the same 100 visitors, sent to each offer:
- $500 product: A $500 purchase is a considered decision. People compare, hesitate, wait for a sale. Say 1 in 100 buys — that’s generous for cold traffic. Earnings: 1 × $15.00 = $15.00
- $59 tool: A $59 tool with a clear job to do is an easy yes for the right visitor. Say 3 in 100 buy. Earnings: 3 × $29.50 = $88.50
Same hundred visitors. Nearly six times the earnings. And I picked conversion numbers that flatter the expensive product — raise the big-ticket price hesitation or lower the tool’s price further, and the gap widens.
This is why I tell beginners to stop asking “what’s the most expensive thing in my niche?” and start asking “what’s the best payout per visitor I can realistically send?”
The third factor nobody puts in the spreadsheet: the refund and the repeat
Two more things belong in your math.
Refunds and clawbacks. A commission isn’t yours until the refund window closes. High-ticket physical products get returned; a returned product is a reversed commission. Cheap digital tools get refunded too, but the dollar swing per reversal is smaller and the volume steadier. When you compare offers, compare kept commissions, not headline commissions.
Buying temperature. A $59 tool purchase often happens on the first visit, from content the visitor found ten minutes ago. A $500 purchase usually takes days of deliberation — and during those days, cookies expire, other affiliates’ links get clicked, and the sale you warmed up gets credited to someone else. The longer the decision, the leakier your attribution. Fast, small, decisive purchases are an affiliate’s friend.
Where this math points you
When I choose what to promote now, I work in this order:
- 1. Digital first. Software, tools, and lifetime deals — high rates, near-zero delivery cost for the seller, quick decisions for the buyer. Platforms like AppSumo exist specifically to distribute these, and some of their new-buyer commissions are dramatically higher than anything a physical marketplace pays.
- 2. Physical products only at high ticket — and even then, check the rate. If I promote something physical, it has to clear the same bar: price × rate has to beat the digital alternative, and the category rate has to be worth the slower, leakier sale.
- 3. Never promote on price alone. A $500 tag with a 3% rate is a $15 offer wearing a costume.
None of this means expensive products are always wrong. If you have warm, high-intent traffic — people actively comparing two specific $500 models — that traffic converts well enough to change the answer. But that’s a specific situation, not a default. The default, for the traffic most of us actually have, is the math above.
One more comparison, for the road
Take a mid-tier option: a $99 tool at a 40% rate. Price × rate = $39.60 per sale. That’s more than twice the payout of the $500 product at 3%, from a purchase a visitor makes without consulting their spouse. The “expensive = lucrative” instinct fails so reliably that I now treat it as a bias to correct, not an intuition to trust. Whenever a big ticket tempts you, run the line of arithmetic first. It takes ten seconds, and it will save you from the most common beginner mistake in this business — working hard to sell expensive things that pay you almost nothing.
The habit to build
Before you join any affiliate program, do the one-line calculation and write it down: price × rate = payout per sale. Then ask how your realistic traffic converts on a purchase of that size. Two minutes of arithmetic, before you build a single page, will save you from the most common beginner mistake in this business — working hard to sell expensive things that pay you almost nothing.
I keep a short checklist of these checks — commission math included — in the free Demand-First Checklist below.
Get the free Demand-First Checklist — including the commission-math check I run before joining any program.