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Quick answer: Amazon hasn’t confirmed a payout cut anywhere official as of today. What’s real is a growing thread of creators reporting Creator Connections and Sponsored Products for Creators (EPC) payouts dropping sharply this week, some by 75 to 90 percent on traffic they say hasn’t changed. Here’s exactly what’s being reported, by whom, and what still has zero official confirmation.
What creators are actually reporting
The clearest thread is on r/Amazon_Influencer, titled “Creator Connections payouts down almost 90 percent this week on identical traffic.” As of today it has grown to 21 comments, all from real accounts describing the same pattern: Creator Connections or Sponsored Products for Creators (EPC) earnings falling hard this week while regular Associates commissions on the same traffic stayed normal.
Specific numbers, all self-reported and unverified beyond the poster’s own word:
- u/haters-gonna-lose: “75% cut for me. I’ve been full time for 3 years now.”
- u/Logical-Chocolate-18: about 80 percent below their own 30-day Creator Connections average on a day when regular Associates earnings were up 25 percent, a pattern that has continued for several days. This creator says they have been in the program over 3 years with more than 1,300 videos and typically make $10,000 to $15,000 a month, which is why they say the swing does not look like normal noise.
- u/jennifromtheblock222: reports the drop is not just onsite, offsite is affected too, with Amazon’s system “only recognizing like 15-20% of orders.”
- u/AdubThePointReckoner: a separate but related complaint that offsite EPC clicks stopped tracking around May 15, with Amazon support eventually agreeing something looked wrong and opening a technical review ticket with a 6-week window that has since lapsed with no resolution.
A second, smaller thread (“something is wrong with EPC… sudden drop in clicks”) has similar reports, including one unsourced comment claiming “sellers complained and Amazon adjusted it to only pay high-converting clicks.” That specific explanation has no source attached anywhere and should be read as a guess, not a fact.
What is confirmed and what is not
To be direct about the evidence line: everything above is creator-reported, from one platform, Reddit. As of today, a fresh search turns up zero press coverage and zero statement from Amazon confirming a payout change, a system issue, or an adjustment to how Sponsored Products for Creators (EPC) clicks get paid. That doesn’t mean the reports are wrong. Multiple creators with years in the program are independently describing the same shape of problem in the same week. It just means there’s nothing official to point to yet, and this post won’t pretend otherwise.
Worth separating two different things that are both circulating this week:
- Creator Connections and EPC payouts reported down sharply (this post): Reddit-only, unconfirmed, days old.
- Amazon Sponsored Products ads moving into creator content starting August 10: this one is officially confirmed by Amazon Ads’ own advertiser notice, and we covered it in full here. The timing is close enough that creators are reasonably asking if the two are connected. Nobody, including Amazon, has said they are.
Why this matters even while it is unconfirmed
If you run Creator Connections campaigns or have Sponsorship Clicks (EPC) live on your storefront, the practical move right now is not to panic, it is to actually look at your own numbers instead of guessing from a Reddit thread or from this post. Creator Connections’ Earnings Reports tab and your Onsite Store ID reporting are two different dashboards showing two different pieces of your money, and it is easy to misread a normal fluctuation as a crash, or the reverse. We wrote a full walkthrough of where each number actually lives: Amazon Commission Rates by Category.
If your own numbers do show the same pattern, the closest thing to an official channel is opening a support ticket and asking specifically about Creator Connections or Sponsorship Clicks reporting accuracy, the same path u/AdubThePointReckoner used to at least get Amazon to acknowledge something looked off, even without a fix.
What we will do next
This is a live, developing story on one platform. We will update this post or publish a follow-up if Amazon says anything official, if press picks it up, or if the pattern in the Reddit thread reverses. Until then, treat every specific percentage in this post as one creator’s own report, not a confirmed program-wide number.