Some legal-type stuff:
“We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.”
This means if you click on an Amazon link, a small percentage of whatever you spend is passed on to us at no extra cost to you, which helps offset the large cost of running this site. We’re signed up to Amazon’s OneLink scheme, so clicking on any text link will, in most cases, redirect you to your local site.
Affiliate tips
With very little notice for affiliates, at the end of 2023 Amazon unilaterally ended their support for existing SiteStripe ads, seriously disrupting millions of sites globally, including this one. Because they can. SiteStripe powers Amazon’s native shopping ads, which typically display an image, product title and current price. When the previous ads died they left ugly grey boxes all over the place, although I’m slowly removing mine. DVDCompare is another site that was badly affected, with tens of thousands of ads needing to be manually replaced.
Amazon has introduced a new generation of SiteStripe ads, with support pages here and here. There are also alternative methods to generate SiteStripe ads using third party software like Lasso who cut off a slice of your commission for their services. Here’s a very good explanation as to how all of this works. But no matter which you choose, all or many of the old ads still need to be individually removed, rebuilt and replaced, perhaps taking several minutes for each. Another third party plugin, AM Image Master, offers the ability to easily bulk-replace old SiteStripe ads for most of the main western Amazon sites excluding Spain and Italy. Although I don’t doubt SiteStripe’s live product images generated more clicks and revenue, for several reasons I’ve decided to bin them off altogether:
- Building and inserting them is very time-consuming and, depending on how many you have, they can easily clutter up articles, cheapening the site’s overall aesthetic.
- They’re very glitchy and prone to spontaneously generating random bits of code (usually data-mce-fragment=”1″), breaking them or at least being visible across the ad to site users. The ads then have to be redone or said bits of code carefully removed without breaking the ad.
- They usually only show higher prices for any given product even though there may actually be many other, much cheaper copies for sale, thus discouraging reader clicks.
- There’s no reason whatsoever why, a few years and countless more ads down the line, Amazon won’t simply discontinue their latest ads in favour of another new type. Then you can start the whole sorry, soul-destroying exercise all over again. Or your third party ad provider could itself roll over and die. Incidentally, neither I nor anyone else can see why Amazon couldn’t have kept their old ads working alongside the new ones.
- Another possibility is that Amazon could abruptly switch off free access to their API (Application Programming Interface) which all SiteStripe ads rely on, just as happened to Twitter/X after its 2022 takeover, rendering third party software defunct.
In future, I’m sticking solely with shortened Amazon product links, embedded as hyperlinks, which carry several advantages.
- They’ll never stop working, even if you’re no longer an affiliate, and are basically bulletproof.
- They can be generated via the Amazon task bar and inserted via your site’s WYSIWYG editor in literally seconds.
- Perhaps best of all, they’re unobtrusive and, as text hyperlinks, are utterly impervious to ad blockers!
Having established all that, I’ll share some techniques I discovered to ensure Amazon’s short links work as efficiently as possible. Firstly, sign up to their OneLink system and become an affiliate for as many countries as necessary. Though not 100% reliable, OneLink should direct users to their chosen product’s listing on their local Amazon site, no matter which countries’ ad they clicked on. Prior to OneLink’s north American launch in 2017, third party sites like Geniuslink and AAWP sprang up to do the same job, for a commission, and are actually still more reliable but OneLink’s improving all the time – and it’s free.
Note that wherever you’re based, Amazon.com is the company’s primary site and OneLink’s redirection facility generally works better via its links than the other sites, so where possible all your links should be created on there. An exception might be if the product is only available in its country of origin or very rare outside of it; in that case it’s advisable to create the ad on its home site.
Minimal, ‘clean’ product URLs redirect the best, so let’s examine those. All Amazon URLs have “gp” or “dp” subdomains and for some reason the latter is universal and works better, so always change it to that one if it isn’t already. All other info before the subdomain and after the ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number, found in every URL and listing’s “Product details” section) is either extraneous product information or tracking codes which impede redirection, so get rid of them.
Thus, a typical listing URL as unwieldy as:
- https://www.amazon.co.uk/North-Northwest-4K-Ultra-HD/dp/B0DG2Z8JDV?crid=5OFS0GQEP4E4&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.tVOSRW8zjiLczsVd_gVIfkgbxRk_4kJQR4uKMBb24bI.Toldwe5v67ZmZk-rQJA4rerkAPX3uB0WmL5LiF_A4YA&dib_tag=se&keywords=North+by+Northwest+%5B4K+Ultra+HD%5D+%5B1959%5D&nsdOptOutParam=true&qid=1734654963&sprefix=north+by+northwest+4k+ultra+hd+1959+%2Caps%2C92&sr=8-1
Becomes simply:
- https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DG2Z8JDV
And that’s the URL you should be using to generate your affiliate link! Do note that freshly-created links sometimes need a few minutes before they can start to redirect properly. Another important note is that links to text searches, such as this one, always redirect instantaneously, with 100% efficiency. I’ve no idea why ’tis so but hopefully the OneLink system will eventually be this consistent across the board. Incidentally, if using text searches avoid non-standard characters, so “Miklos Rozsa” rather than the otherwise correct “Miklós Rózsa”. I’ve discovered dozens of other little tricks and could keep writing, but if you’ve any questions ask in the comments and I’ll do my best to help.