Why Amazon Affiliate Reports Are Not Realtime?

While AdSense reports are near real-time. This is exactly the same question asked in the comments section.

The technical reason is it’s difficult and expensive to do it.

However, Google does it. So, what’s the big deal? So, the functional reason is, Google is forced to aggregate the raw logs while Amazon is not based on the business model. You see, Google has to make sure it doesn’t overshoot the budgets set by the advertisers after each click. So, they have to keep aggregating the data. However, in case of Amazon, the advertiser equivalent party, the spenders, are the buyers and there is no budget setting for these buyers. They come, they buy what they want, they pay and leave. So, Amazon doesn’t really have to worry about overshooting someone’s budget and as a result, they can choose to run the reports once a day to aggregate the affiliate commissions.

Infact, many ad networks typically have the policy of reflecting the ad revenues in near real-time while the statistics on impressions are delayed a bit (for CPC ads impressions don’t count).