An Amazon Site Costs $11.08 a Year to Keep and $1,529 to Sell on Flippa. Run Five, Keep the Winners, Sell the Rest

Why this pays

The plan sounds simple: build several small Amazon sites, keep the ones that earn, sell the ones that do not. Amazon's pages and the marketplaces' pages say it can be done, and they also say exactly where it goes wrong: one account, one 180-day clock, a 60-day payment lag that makes early judgements meaningless, and marketplaces that either will not list a small site or take a fifth of it.

Run in the order those rules impose, the portfolio pays twice: commissions on the winners, about 60 days later, and a wire for each loser that a marketplace will take.

The play, in three lines

1. Join Amazon Associates once, cost every site to the dollar on one sheet, and do not start the second site until the first has referred a sale.
2. Build each site for the reader 24 hours from buying, then wait the full 60-day payment lag before you judge any of them.
3. List every site that misses the bar on the marketplace that will take it, Motion Invest or Flippa, with the exit fee priced against the sale and the buyer told in writing that the Associates account stays with you.

The path above walks every step. What follows is the reasoning behind each and the numbers you quote from.

Where the money comes from

• Amazon, on the winners. Commission on items placed in the cart within 24 hours of the click, paid about 60 days after the end of the month, by direct deposit above a $10 floor.
• A buyer, on the losers. A small content site with real traffic and analytics history, priced by the formula Empire Flippers publishes: 12 months of net profit times a multiple, typically 1.7 to 5 or higher. Wired 3 to 6 business days after the transfer on Motion Invest.
• Not the marketplace. It takes its cut on the way through: $29 plus 10% on Flippa, 20% under $20,000 on Motion Invest, a flat $10,000 on Empire Flippers, which will not list a site under $2,000 a month anyway.

The pain you are selling the cure for

Two buyers, two pains. The Amazon shopper is choosing between two specific products and wants someone who has compared them to say which; a page that does that converts the same evening. The site buyer wants a small property with a year of clean numbers they can grow, and is paying for the history you kept. What neither will pay for is the thing most portfolios are made of: sites judged on six weeks of data and sold on noise.

Step one: one account, one clock

• Joining is free, and one account carries all your sites in its site list.
• The clock runs once per application: Amazon evaluates it after three qualifying sales and withdraws it if there were not enough inside 180 days. Personal orders do not count. The first site must be selling before the hours go into the fifth.
• The account cannot be assigned or transferred without Amazon's prior written approval. That settles, before anything is built, what a buyer of a site gets and does not get.
• The affiliate guide builds the first site to Amazon's review standard.

Step two: what a site costs before it earns

• A .com at Porkbun: $11.08 to register and $11.08 a year to renew, privacy and SSL included.
• Namecheap Stellar shared hosting: $5.88 a month for 3 hosted domains and 20 GB of SSD. A fourth site needs a second plan.
• 60 to 100 articles per site. A 1,500-word draft is about 2,000 tokens: about a cent at Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5 ($1 per million input tokens, $5 per million output), a fraction of one at OpenAI's gpt-4o-mini ($0.15 and $0.60). The article-cost page carries the editing multiplier that turns cents into hours.
• Amazon's bonus-commissions topic is not readable without a login, so no bonus figure appears on this sheet.

Step three: build for the last 24 hours of the decision

• Commission is earned on items placed in the cart within 24 hours of arriving through your link. Articles for readers who have not decided what kind of thing to buy send clicks that expire; articles for readers choosing between two products send clicks that convert.
• Tag every link with your Associate ID. Put the link-level disclosure and the sentence As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases on every site.

Step four: the 60 days you do not skip

• Paid about 60 days after the end of the month the commission was earned; below $10 a direct deposit balance rolls into the next month.
• A site's first real month is visible in the payment two months later. The earliest honest comparison between two sites is three months after the second one launched. Write that date on each column and list nothing before it.

Step five: which marketplace will take a loser

• Empire Flippers: at least $2,000 a month in net profit averaged over 12 months, 12 months of revenue history, analytics tracking for 3 months. A site that missed your bar does not qualify.
• Motion Invest: no published minimum income, traffic or age; listing by approval after a 10-step due diligence review.
• Flippa: a sub-$10K business lists for a $29 flat fee for a 60-day Entry listing.
• For a site you are dropping, the choice is Motion Invest or Flippa. The content-site page reads what each asks for at listing.

What the exit costs

The chart above prices a $15,000 sale on each. Flippa: the $29 Entry listing plus a 10% success fee, $1,529. Motion Invest: 20% under $20,000, then 15%, 10%, 7%, down to 5% over $500,000, so $3,000. Empire Flippers: no listing fee and a flat $10,000 commission on sales up to $66,666.66, then 15% up to $700,000, with a two-month exclusivity period; two-thirds of this sale, and the site would not qualify anyway. Price the exit against the sale, not against the site's income; the fee decides whether selling beats leaving it up.

The handover, and the days to the wire

• Motion Invest: average time from listing to sale 12 days, due diligence 3 to 7 days, the transfer 3 to 7 days, the seller paid by wire 3 to 6 business days after the transfer is confirmed.
• Flippa: median time to close for businesses sold in 2023 was 15 days under $50K, 49 days between $50K and $250K, 73 above; embedded Letter of Intent and Asset Purchase Agreement templates for the handover.
• Empire Flippers: migration typically 2 to 8 weeks, the seller paid a reasonable time after it completes.
• Motion Invest can terminate or suspend an account immediately, without notice, for policy breaches or any other reason. The listing is not a place to keep your only copy of anything.

What the buyer gets, and what stays

• The buyer gets the domain, the content, the traffic and the analytics history.
• The buyer does not get the Associates account: not transferable without Amazon's prior written approval, and Amazon can end the agreement at any time, with or without cause, on 7 calendar days' written notice. Say so in the listing.
• On transfer day, remove the site from your site list and your tags from its links; the buyer applies for their own account with their own 180-day clock. The $20-digital-file page reads the same who-keeps-what question for products.

What to do today

1. Open the sheet: one column per site, with $11.08, $5.88 a month and the article count at the top, and the date its first paid month arrives at the bottom.
2. Join Associates once. Build the first site for the reader choosing between two products; do not start the second until the first has referred a sale.
3. When a site misses its bar after the 60 days, price its exit on Motion Invest and Flippa from the chart, and write the sentence about the Associates account into the listing before you publish it.