When it comes to earning money for your blog or online business, affiliate marketing is a great option. What better way to make money than by recommending products and services you know your audience can truly benefit from, and earning a commission on your recommendations. It’s a winning situation all around — for your visitors, the product developer, and you.

In 1996, Amazon.com started their Amazon Associates program, becoming one of the first affiliate online retailers. Of course, today Amazon is a giant in Internet retail and provides site owners and online businesses the opportunity to earn referral fees from all kinds of products to a massive, pre-existing marketplace.

Amazon Affiliate for WordPress (AAWP), is a premium plugin that helps affiliates increase their conversions and earnings in the Amazon.com marketplace.

Whether doing product reviews, advertisements, or just providing simple text links, AAWP allows users the ability to customize the presentation of Amazon products on their website, with an impressive range of features and flexibility.

Main Features of Amazon Affiliate for WordPress

• Earn commissions (referral fees) by advertising Amazon products on your site

• Automatic updating of product prices and discounts

• Automatic generation of affiliate links along with your Amazon tracking ID

• Automatically generated text links with the product name (with the option to manually overwrite product names)

• Amazon bestseller or new releases lists for specific product groups or keywords, along with the option to set the number of products listed (e.g., top three, top 10)

• Add Amazon products on your page by using shortcodes along with the Amazon product article number (ASIN/ISBN)

• Customize the functionality and output of your affiliate listings sitewide, or individually with shortcodes

• Use data fields to show or leave out the product information you wish (e.g., show product information by placing the data within your text, or build product comparison tables)

• Display single or multiple product boxes for an Amazon product with a simple shortcode (along with the product title, description, price, discounts, availability, and call-to-action buttons)

• Customize the design and style of your product displays with different designs, custom styles, or PHP templates

• Display products in your sidebar with widgets

• Caching for fast loading times

• Satisfies Amazon’s terms and conditions for price display guidelines by automatically showing the date/time of the most recent price update

• Support for multiple Amazon Partner Networks, including USA, UK, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Canada, Spain, India and Brazil

Setting Up Amazon Affiliate for WordPress

Licensing

After installing and activating Amazon Affiliate for WordPress, the first thing you need to do is go to the first tab and enter the license key that came with the plugin, and then click the Activate License button.

After you activate your license, you’ll get a green “License valid” notice next to the Status display.

Amazon API

After validating the plugin license, go to the next tab and integrate the Amazon Product Advertising API into your site.

To get started with that, click the blue Amazon Product Advertising API link as shown in the image below, and you’ll be taken to Amazon.com to register for the Amazon Product Advertising API and receive your personal API credentials (API Key and API Secret).

And of course, if you aren’t signed up as an Amazon affiliate yet, you’ll want to do that as well to get your Amazon Associates Tracking ID. Add your Amazon tracking ID to the plugin’s settings so your ID is automatically added to your affiliate links.

After entering your API Key, your API Secret code, and your Amazon Associates Tracking ID, click the Save Changes button. The Status display should change to “Connected”.

Using Amazon Affiliate for WordPress

The third tab is the where you set the General, or global settings for AAWP.

Here’s the Options for the General Tab:

• Choose the shortcode you want to use for your product displays. You can choose either [amazon] or [aawp] as the beginning base for your shortcodes.

• Set the cache duration for speeding up your displays. The plugin allows you to cache all data except for the images. You can set the cache between one hour and one week, with several choices in-between.

• Choose the default text link format, either standard or a shortened version. AAWP has a cloaked option coming in the future.

• You can turn on SSL support for images, in case your site is running the more secure HTTPS protocol.

• You can add support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), to speed up your pages on mobile displays.

• Choose between the “Date” and “Date and Time” format for telling readers when the Amazon information was last updated.

• You can show custom text with your product box displays.

• If you wish, you can set custom disclaimer information as required by Amazon’s API License Agreement.

• You have the option to display a credit to the AAWP plugin developers.

• You have the ability to instantly clear out the cache for saved data.

The fourth tab over is where you specify the Output settings for things like product titles, descriptions, pricing, ratings, buttons, and custom CSS.

Here’s the Options for the Output Tab:

• You have the option to put a character limit on your product title length.

• You can add custom text to the end of every product title (with the option to also add it to the end of your image link titles).

• You can choose the number of bullet points to show in your description, along with the option to limit the character length of each bullet point sentence.

• You can choose whether or not you want HTML formatting for your description.

• Select whether to show or hide rating stars, along with different size options for the stars.

• Choose whether to show or hide the number of product reviews.

• You can show or hide advertised pricing for products.

• Choose whether to show price reductions as a total amount, percentage, or not display any price reductions. You can also choose where to display the price reduction.

• Select whether to show the Amazon Prime logo besides the advertised price, (whenever the service is available for the related product).

As an additional benefit, the Amazon Prime logo is linked to the “Amazon Prime 30-day free trial” landing page, and you can receive commissions for referrals.

• You can choose the color, style, and text label for the Amazon Buy and Details buttons.

• You can use custom CSS to make any style changes to your product title, descriptions, ratings, pricing, and buttons.

• As with the General tab, you have the ability to instantly clear out the cache for saved data.

The next tab over, the Functions tab, allows you to specify settings for things like product links, product boxes, bestseller lists, and new releases.

Here’s the Options for the Functions Tab:

• You have the option of whether or not to show an Amazon or cart icon after the product link.

• For product box displays, bestseller displays, and new release displays, you have the option to use the standard template, a table template (good for product comparisons), or your own custom template.

• AAWP comes with three styles out-of-the-box: Standard, Light, or Dark. You can also customize your own style with CSS.

• AAWP comes with PHP templating abilities to help you customize the display of your Amazon products for boxes, lists, and widgets.

• As with the other tabs, you have the option to clear your cache.

The Support tab, the final tab for Amazon Affiliate for WordPress, gives you feedback about the plugin and your WordPress site to make sure everything is working properly and to help you diagnose any problems.

Here’s a Look at the Items in the Support Tab:

• The Plugin section tells you whether or not you have a proper connection between your website and the Amazon Product Advertising API.

• The Environment section tells you what version of WordPress and PHP you’re running, as well as whether or not you have the proper PHP extensions enabled for the plugin to function.

• Any items marked in red instead of green indicate problem areas that can be fixed by looking into the documentation.

• The plugin also includes a Debug mode for problem solving.

Up and Running with Shortcodes

With Amazon Affiliate for WordPress, you can create single (or multiple) products and lists by using shortcodes with the WordPress editor.

To add Amazon products to a WordPress page or post, you just need:

• One of the plugin’s shortcodes

• The article number (ASIN for products or ISBN for books) from Amazon.

Any shortcode can be enhanced by adding any of the available attributes to it.

How to Display an Amazon Product with the ASIN

1. With your Amazon Associates account active, search for the product you wish to display on your site. In this example, I found a Sony TV.
2. After locating the product on Amazon, copy its product number from the URL. In the image below, the product ASIN number follows “product/” in the circled URL.

3. In your WordPress editor, use a shortcode from the AAWP documentation along with the ASIN number to display the product.

Below you can see two shortcode examples. One for a text link and one for a product box. You can also do shortcodes for bestseller lists.

These are very basic examples. Shortcodes can be customized with many different attributes.

And below you can see the automatically generated results. A text link for the product at top, and a product “box” displayed underneath it.

Again, these examples are very simple, but they show the basic workflow for creating product displays. For more information, the product documentation does an excellent job at providing numerous examples. Below is a comparison table example.

Here’s a bestseller list example that was created with the plugin.

Support & Documentation for Amazon Affiliate for WordPress

The Amazon Affiliate for WordPress website includes a Help & Support page with an impressive amount of online documentation.

The documentation includes information for the following areas:

Installation
Basics
Settings
Amazon Product Advertising API
Functions
Tips & Tricks

The makers of the plugin also provide answers to the most frequently asked questions about installation, setup, and use. And if you need more help, you can create a support ticket where they offer to “find a solution to any of your problems.”

Although the plugin was developed by a German web developer, the team behind the plugin also provides English-speaking support.

Customers are encouraged to contact them through their support e-mail for any presale or after-sale questions, including questions about installation, configuration, or use of the plugin.

That being said, I found their documentation to be very thorough and helpful.

Pricing for Amazon Affiliate for WordPress

There are three pricing levels for the AAWP premium plugin. You get all of the features of the plugin with all versions, along with one year of updates and support.

The Standard version is good for one domain. The list price is €39 (approximately $44 at the time of this writing).

The Business version is good for three domains along with Multisite usage. The price is €99 (about $112).

The Developer version can be used on unlimited domains, includes Multisite usage, and allows for customer projects. The price is €199 (about $225).

You can continue to use the plugin for as long as you want, and after one year, you have the option to extend the license for update and support at a special 40% discounted price. You can upgrade a license at any time.

Updates to the plugin are handled automatically through WordPress.

AAWP comes with a 30 day money back guarantee.

Amazon Affiliate for WordPress Conclusions & Recommendations

AAWP is a premium affiliate plugin that offers lots of options and functionality for the WordPress affiliate user looking to boost their earnings through Amazon.com.

The power of the plugin runs quite deep, and its full capabilities are far beyond what this review could possibly cover.

Less experienced users to WordPress might find some of the options and power behind the plugin a bit daunting at first glance, but the detailed documentation is a definite help in getting past any initial concerns.

More experienced WordPress users will appreciate the functionality, features, and ability to customize through CSS and PHP templating, and will want to give this plugin a good look.

And with a 30 day money back guarantee, there’s no reason not to give it a test run and see if Amazon Affiliate for WordPress meets your needs.

Find out more about Amazon Affiliate for WordPress plugin here