When you’re thinking of starting a profitable Amazon affiliate website, you certainly need to know about new changes in Amazon’s New Product Advertising API Key Policy for Affiliates. So what is this new Amazon PA API policy? How can we build a store without an API key? Let’s see in this article.
Amazon has more than 600 million products, and each day, they are adding thousands of new products. It’s simply not possible to visibility for all their products. It is also not possible for customers to search the best from all the products. So you can start an Amazon affiliate website and help them sell their products and make good money in the process.
Tip to Increase Traffic: If you can add product question and answers on the product pages themselves, you can target multiple keywords for the Amazon products. When users are satisfied with the answers they will purchase the products with your referral link.
To add product reviews and rating functionality to your amazon affiliate website check out the StarCat Reviews Plugin.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
So, let’s start with the basics. Affiliate Marketing is very simple. You refer people to buy products, and you get commissions. You might have to educate them on things like why the product is right for them, how the product can help them etc. When you people refer to buy the products, you get a commission, which may be a percentage of a slave or a fixed amount.
For affiliate marketing, you can create a website or a social media page, and you get a specialized link called referral link from the seller. When people click this link to buy a product, they are tracked by tracking software, and when they make the purchase, you will get a commission which would be paid monthly or when it reaches a good amount (say $100). When affiliate marketing is done right, it can be a good source of income.
What is the Amazon Affiliate Program?
One of the best and easy ways of affiliate marketing is starting an Amazon Affiliate program. You can refer Amazon products from your website, blog, social media pages, etc., and get commissions as advertising fees from Amazon for the sales you refer. Amazon Affiliate program is also called Amazon Associates. You can join Amazon Affiliate program here.
Recently Amazon’s policy changes have brought some challenges for beginners to be profitable from the Amazon Affiliate program. But it is possible for beginners, to start a successful Amazon Affiliate store is and we will see how.
What is an Amazon Affiliate Website?
Source: ecommerceceo.com
When you create an affiliate website resembling a web store with the content (price, images, reviews, etc.,) from the original store, it is called an affiliate eCommerce website. Amazon has millions of products, but you need to create a mini store with limited products on a specific niche market. For Amazon affiliate store, you can create a web store and get the original content through the Amazon’s Product Advertising API key. You can easily import specific products with the API key, and the products will be synchronized and updated automatically.
Do I need a website to be an Amazon affiliate?
No, you don’t necessarily need a website for becoming a Amazon affiliate. You can simply refer from your social media pages like YouTube, Instagram etc., But having an affiliate eCommerce website can bring multichannel referrals and a website could help build a brand.
Do you get paid for clicks on Amazon affiliate?
No you don’t get paid for clicks. You get paid only when the clicks convert into sales. That is people need to buy the products you refer and only then you get a commission. Clicks mean nothing here if they don’t convert.
A Profitable Amazon Affiliate Website Examples
Just creating an affiliate website alone is not going to bring people to your affiliate eCommerce store. You need to get creative and write content like a blog article to attract people to your store. Your content has to convince them to purchase through your affiliate eCommerce website.
You can get ideas and strategies by seeing some of the best Amazon affiliate websites like the ones listed below.
Creating a WordPress Affiliate Site with StarCat Reviews:
If you notices what is common in many popular Amazon Affiliates website, they’re all product review sites that review the best Amazon products.
So if you want to create a profitable Amazon affiliate site then you would have to create it as a Amazon product review site. StarCat Reviews plugin helps you to easily create a product review site to earn Amazon affiliate income.
SiteStripe
You can also make use of the Amazon’s SiteStripe feature that you to create links directly from the Amazon.com site without having to visit Associates Central. It also doesn’t seem to require Amazon API key.
What’s an Amazon Product Advertising API Key?
Amazon’s Product Advertising API gives you access to Amazon’s products (with all the details) to monetize your website. After you got your Associate account, you need to sign up for the Product Advertising API. Then you receive a pair of credentials: an access key ID and secret access key. You have these credentials to submit requests to the Product Advertising API.
With an API key, you can access and import Amazon’s products and their details to your affiliate website. You can import the price, images, description, and everything which the Amazon store has. So an API key and the policy for API key becomes very crucial for an affiliate store.
What’s the New Product Advertising API Key Policy?
From January 2019, Amazon has updated their Product Advertising API Key policy, which is quite restrictive from the earlier policy. When you start a new affiliate account, you get API access. You will have it for 180 days within which you need to give at least 3 sales.
After you get 3 sales, your site will be reviewed by Amazon, and if you pass the review, you can continue with the API. If you don’t pass your affiliate account may be rejected.
You might think you’re free to use the API after 180 days, but it is not so. You need to give regular sales to Amazon every month to keep your API access. If you give 0 sales for a month, your API access will be removed.
Not only that, Amazon limits the number of products that can be imported using API, based on your sales numbers. You cannot give just 10 sales per month and keep importing thousands of products from Amazon. Your limit will increase if your sales numbers increase every month.
Note: This is not an all exclusive coverage of the Amazon Product API policy. Also, Amazon keeps updating its policies. If you want to know the current policy, you visit their Amazon official website. We don’t speak for Amazon.
How to create an Amazon Affiliate Website with WordPress? (without an API key)
If you want to run an Amazon affiliate website, you certainly need a Product Advertising API Key. You only lose your API access if you do not refer any sales. Many of the affiliate stores didn’t have any problems with the new policy.
But for beginners who had just put up an affiliate website, it is not certain that they will have sales every month. It is a harsh reality. Especially many items on the Amazon store are seasonal. You may refer some good number of sales on Christmas but not on every other month. Also, trends keep changing; new items keep coming all the time.
When you lose your API access, the product content will go automatically, and your site will be broken. So if you are facing this, you need to have a system where you can import content from Amazon without an API key. There is a product which lets you do just this, and it is called W00Zone WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates plugin.
Also see: the best WordPress plugins for Amazon Affiliate
Creating a Amazon Affiliate Website with WooZone (WZone) Amazon Affiliates
WooZone WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates
We are going to use WordPress as an Amazon affiliate website builder. It’s a free tool, so if you’re are wondering how to make an affiliate website for free, it is the best Amazon affiliate website builder for you.
What is WooZone?
WooZone WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates plugin a.k.a WZone plugin is a software with which can create an Amazon affiliate store without an API key. WooZone is a WordPress plugin, so if you are going to use it to build your affiliate store, you need to create your website with WordPress Amazon affiliate website builder and have WooCommerce plugin installed on it.
WordPress and WooCommerce are indeed free tools, and setting them up is also quite easy. However, you need to get a domain and hosting for your store. These things are easy and can be done in a matter of a few minutes. See this guide article to see how to get a domain, hosting, and installing WordPress.
Other tools which can be used as Amazon Affiliate Website Builder
If you are thinking of alternatives to WordPress as an Amazon affiliate website builder, you have options like Shopify, Bigcommerce, etc., but they are quite costly and don’t have good features for an affiliate website.
Installing WooCommerce plugin
After you get your WordPress website, you need to install WooCommerce on your site because it converts your website into a web store. It can be done from the dashboard of your WordPress website.
See this documentation for installing the WooCommerce plugin.
Installing the WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates plugin
Now your store is ready for the WooZone plugin. It’s a premium plugin that you can buy for $49 for a lifetime, which is a good investment considering how much money you can make an affiliate marketing. Get the WooZone WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates plugin from here.
After you have bought the WooZone plugin, install it on your web store. See this video tutorial for installing and setting up your WooCommerce Amazon Affiliate website with the WooZone plugin.
Import Amazon products to WooCommerce store (without API)
Spend some time setting up the WooZone, it comes with a good documentation, so go through the plugins docs before you launch your store. After you have done with all the basic settings, you are ready to import Amazon products to WooCommerce store without an API key.
WooZone calls it Direct Import feature that you can use with WooZone Chrome extension. They give you a special WZone Direct Import chrome extension which you have to install on your chrome browser. Then you can go to any Amazon product pages and grab the product using the extension and upload it to your store.
Below is a good video tutorial, follow this video to directly import from Amazon without an API key.
Sync to Amazon without API
WZone has a new Synchronize without any PA API Keys features with which you can update the pricing and other details of the products on your store from Amazon.
Using Amazon SiteStripe (no need for API)
Another method without API keys is Amazon SiteStripe feature. It allows you to create referral links directly from the Amazon site page. You can get a text link, image link, text + image link, etc.,
You can use these links on your product page and get affiliate commissions. After you get some sales, you can get your API access and then you can import the products easily.
You can turn on SiteStripe from your Associates account Associate Central.
Using WooZone WordPress Amazon Affiliates plugin with an API key
WooZone can also be used with an API key. You can unlock its full power when you do so.
When you have API, you can use a feature called Insane Import Mode. With the Insane Import Mode, you quickly search for products, filter products based on keywords, and import all the products and their variations in bulk. It makes importing products from Amazon so easy.
You can also import products using ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) code and CSV files.
Other Important Amazon Affiliate features of WooZone
Some other crucial features of WooZone Amazon affiliates plugin are,
- Amazon Recommendations
- Auto Import Amazon products
- Add Multiple Amazon Keys
- Content Spinner
- Product Availability by Country
- WZone reports
So with WZone, you can easily import products from Amazon using API, and when you don’t have the API access, you can still scrape the products from Amazon and run your store until you get a sale. Thus you have a single solution for a successful WooCommerce Amazon affiliates website. So what are you waiting for?
Get WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates Plugin Now
What do you think of this method? Have you tried WZone yet? Have an alternative? Please write to us in the comments section.
are you sure that woozone plug-in does not violate amazon’s policy?
Amazon is constantly changing its policy. Woozone plugin author is also improving it to match their policy. For recent policy changes you have to contact the plugin’s author.
Great post. Definitely this one of the informative and useful post to me. Thanks much for sharing.
Thanks Very Help Full Articles About Amazon Affiliate.