Should You Buy an Amazon Influencer Course? How I Vet One Before Spending a Dollar

There are a ton of Amazon influencer courses being sold on TikTok right now, and I get asked about them constantly. Here is the thing people expect me to say and I am not going to say it: I am not anti-course. A $600 blogging course back in 2021 genuinely changed the direction of my life. It led to roughly $5,000 a month in Amazon affiliate commissions before I had ever touched the Amazon Influencer Program. So no, I do not think paying to learn something is a scam.

But I vetted that course hard before I bought it, and vetting is the part almost everybody skips. They see a checkout page, they feel the urgency, they read a few reviews, and they hand over the money. So let me walk you through exactly how I decide whether a course is worth paying for — the same process I would use today if I were staring at a sales page wondering whether this thing is legit.

Why I Am Not Anti-Course

The internet has decided that every course is a grift. I understand why — there is a lot of garbage out there. But that blogging course I bought in 2021 did three things for me that I could not have gotten by watching free YouTube videos for six months.

It compressed the timeline. Somebody who had already made the mistakes handed me the order of operations.
It gave me a mindset shift. I stopped thinking like someone posting content and started thinking like someone building an asset. That shift is what eventually pushed me toward the Amazon Influencer Program.
It gave me accountability. This is the underrated one. Free information does not care whether you finish. A course you paid for, with a community attached to it, does.

So the question is never “are courses bad.” The question is “is this course, taught by this person, worth this money to me right now.” That is a much more answerable question.

A Bad Review Does Not Always Mean a Bad Course

This is where most people stop their research, and it is the shallowest possible signal. Go read the negative reviews of any course and actually read what the complaint is. A huge percentage of them are some version of “I bought it and did not make money.”

That is not a review of the course. That is a review of the person’s follow-through. The Amazon Influencer Program is a volume game with a slow ramp. Somebody who bought a course, shot four videos, and quit in three weeks was never going to make money regardless of what they bought. Their one-star review tells you nothing about whether the teaching was any good.

What I look for in negative reviews is specificity. “The modules were outdated and still referenced a feature Amazon removed” is a real signal. “The support never responded to me” is a real signal. “I did not get rich” is noise.

A Good Review Does Not Always Mean a Good Course

Now flip it, because this one is sneakier and it catches a lot of people.

When you are reading a glowing review of a course, the very first thing you should do is check whether there is an affiliate code attached to it. If the person raving about the course earns a commission every time somebody buys through their link, you are not reading a review. You are reading an ad that has been dressed up as a review.

And let me be clear, because this is not a knock on affiliate programs — I make my living in affiliate marketing. There is nothing wrong with earning a commission for recommending something you believe in. But you, as the buyer, need to know when a financial incentive is sitting behind the recommendation you are reading. That context changes how much weight it deserves.

The test I use: would this person have said the same thing if there were no payout? If I cannot tell, I go find a review from somebody who has no link in the description.

Check Their Storefront Creator Star Level

Here is my favorite trick, and it takes about thirty seconds.

If somebody is selling you an Amazon Influencer Program course, go look at their Amazon storefront and check their creator star level. Amazon assigns that tier based on actual performance in the program. It is not something you can buy, fake, or talk your way into.

If the person teaching you how to earn in this program is sitting at a low tier, you have your answer. They may be a wonderful person. They may be a great communicator. But they are not currently proving they can swing the hammer they are trying to sell you.

Ask to See Commission Statements

The second proof point is commission statements. Anyone who is actually earning in this program has them, and the people who are proud of their results tend to show them without being asked.

Be a little skeptical about what you are shown, though. A single screenshot of one great month is not the same as a track record. I would rather see a boring stretch of consistent months than one spike. Consistency is what proves a repeatable system exists, and a repeatable system is the only thing worth paying to learn.

The Biggest Red Flag of All

Everything above rolls up into one question, and it is the biggest red flag in this entire space: is this person making their money from the Amazon Influencer Program, or are they making their money from selling courses about the Amazon Influencer Program?

Those are two completely different businesses. If someone’s income is coming almost entirely from teaching, then what they are actually an expert at is marketing a course, not earning commissions. You can usually feel this when you look at their content — everything funnels toward a sale, and there is never any real proof of results in the program itself.

Look for proof before you buy. Not promises. Proof.

Go With Your Gut

After you have done all of that — read the negative reviews for specifics, discounted the affiliate-driven praise, checked the creator star level, looked for commission statements — you will usually have a feeling one way or the other. Trust it.

If something feels off, there will be another course next month. Nobody has ever missed their one shot at this program because they passed on a sales page. But plenty of people have talked themselves into a purchase they already suspected was wrong, and that money is gone.

One last thought. A course can teach you a process, but it cannot do the product research for you every single day. That is the part I got tired of doing manually, which is why I built Oink — to find products actually worth making content for, surface Creator Connections opportunities, and stop me from wasting shoots on products that were never going to convert. If you would rather spend your money on something that works every day instead of something you watch once, come take a look.