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AAWP Review (2023): Is the Worth for Amazon Affiliates?
Are you starting your career as an affiliate marketer? Or do you want to earn extra aside from your usual niche? Whatever your reasons are, there are a lot of affiliate solutions in the market to help you do just that. But finding the right one can be difficult. It still depends on your needs and preference. In this in-depth AAWP review, we take a look at the No. 1 Amazon Affiliate Plugin and share exactly how it works. We’ll deep dive into its key features, pros, and cons, up to the installation and setup. Stay tuned by reading our review of Amazon Affiliate for WordPress.
AAWP Review
Amazon Affiliate for WordPress or also known as AAWP is a plugin that allows you to pull Amazon product information into your WordPress website. Monetize by using affiliate links generated by joining their Associate’s program. The links are generated dynamically and then cached so you will always display up-to-date information – things like price, description, images, and so on, this means no more outdated information for your site visitors.
The Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin allows you to create simple text links to products, product boxes with images and information, bestseller lists, and comparison tables. You can also place the items using the shortcode system or the included widget. The design and output are customizable so you can tailor the plugin to what you want to achieve – change buttons, HTML, CSS, and other details.
AAWP offers various pricing plans depending on your needs and preferences. A 30-day money-back guarantee is included upon purchasing the license.
- Personal – €49 for 1 site billed yearly
- Plus – €129 for 3 sites billed yearly
- Pro – €249 for 10 sites billed yearly
- Ultimate – €399 for 25 sites billed yearly
AAWP Key Features
- Amazon Partner Networks – The following Amazon Partner Networks are supported and can be selected through the plugin settings: Germany, USA, UK, France, Japan, Italy, Canada, Spain, India & Brazil.
- Tracking-ID -Your tracking ID shall be deposited in the plugin settings and automatically used in the generation of all affiliate links. Per shortcode you can specifically override the tracking ID in case you want to perform any kind of A / B testing.
- Automated Data Retrieval – The product information such as name, description or current price are retrieved automatically via the Amazon Product Advertising API. Here, you can decide yourself how often the data is updated. This means no more worrying about manually updating your own prices or descriptions.
- Caching – In order to reduce loading times, the plugin comes along with its own caching functionality. After retrieving product information they will be temporarily stored (everything except images) and delivered immediately on the next page visit. The caching duration can be adjusted via the plugin settings.
- Price information (privacy policy) – According to the terms and conditions of Amazon Associates, there has to be an indication of timeliness for the displayed prices. With our Amazon Affiliate WordPress plugin you are able to display the date/time of the recent price update automatically.
- Text links – With text links you can issue a specific product name inside your content. Here, the corresponding link and output name are generated automatically. The product name can be overwritten manually.
- Product boxes – Do you want a specific Amazon product to be displayed in a single post or page? With one shortcode you can easily display one or more visually appealing product boxes. Features included in the product boxes are for example: title, description, current availability and prices, discounts and call-to-action buttons.
- Bestseller (lists) – With the bestseller lists you can deliver a really strong selling reason to your visitors by listing the best-selling products to a specific product group or keyword. In addition, you have the ability to set the number of products individually: e.g. Top 3, Top 10 etc.
- New Releases (lists) – What about attracting your visitor’s attention towards the latest products within a specific product group? Just like the bestseller lists, you have the ability to set the number rankings of the products themselves.
- Fields – Using “Fields” you can place individual product information (such as the title, description, current price or buy button) anywhere in your posts / pages. These can also be used directly inside your template files via the provided PHP functions.
- Widgets – In order to Integrate items into your sidebar, widgets are available to assist you. Here you can choose between the core functionality listed above. If you need more adjustments, you can alternatively place the shortcodes in a text widget (or Visual Composer) too.
- Different styles – From the start, you can choose between different styles: Standard, Light and Dark. Additionally it’s possible to customize the output via CSS. Therefore we prepared a handy box on the plugin settings page.
- Titles – You can limit the number of characters appearing in the product title or determine the title itself. Additionally you can attach extra characters (such as an asterisk*), which gives you the ability to add a reference to affiliate links.
- Descriptions – Product The Amazon API provides product descriptions in the form of a bullet list. You can adjust the total number of list items, and the number of characters per line (similar to the titles). In addition, you can use your own product description (incl. HTML formatting).
- Reviews – The output of the star rating and the total number of submitted reviews can be enabled/disabled via the plugin settings.
- Price – The sales price and possibly available price reductions can be hidden via the plugin settings. With the price reduction, you also have the choice to display the values as a percentage or in EUR/USD etc..
- Amazon prime service – For products which can be ordered as part of the Amazon Prime service, the Prime icon is displayed next to the selling price. This feature allows you to improve conversion and increase your commissions for new prime signups. However the prime logo can be disabled via the plugin settings.
- Buy now & detail buttons – The appearance of the “Buy on Amazon” button can be customised: Choose between different styles and/or adjust the displayed text (changing completely or adding an asterix * for example). Additionally to the normal buy button you can add a second button, the so called “Detail Button” which can be used to place custom links for reviews, internal/external urls etc.
- PHP-Templating – If you want a completely different presentation of the products, you can tweak them using integrated PHP templating. This means you still have the ability to make individual and specific changes – according to your needs – to the output of product boxes, lists, and widgets.
Pros
- By using the multiple data fields, you can create tables for product comparison
- Geo Target your visitors to the Amazon near them based on their location
- It also allows you to place ads wherever you want the ads to appear on your website
Cons
- The user interface is not beginner friendly. You might consider familiarizing yourself first with the function and tools of this plugin.
- Users of this plugin need to open Amazon separately to find the products as this plugin doesn’t have the search option.
- A bit expensive for the first time users and users only having 1 website.
AAWP Installation & Setup
The technical requirements for this plugin are as follows, most web hosts will meet these:
- PHP 5.3 or newer
- MySQL 5.0.3 or newer
- WordPress 3.4 or newer
- PHP REST, SOAP & curl extensions installed and enabled
Once you have uploaded the plugin and activated it, visit the plugin settings page and enter your license key which you will receive in the welcome email.
The next step is to connect an “Amazon Advertising API”. If you haven’t already got one, you can sign up on the Amazon website. You will also need to sign up for Amazon Web Services to create the API keys and you will also need an Amazon Associates account which is what handles your affiliate commissions and payouts etc. Once your account is connected, you should choose which country you would like to use from the dropdown box, and also enter your associate’s ID in the box to make sure that your affiliate ID is added to all outgoing links so you will be compensated for any sales you send.
Once your account is connected, you should visit the “General” tab where you can configure some options for the plugin – you can choose which shortcode to use, the cache duration ( how often pricing & info is updated), and which type of affiliate link to use, you can choose between standard and shorten at the moment – there is an option for cloaked but it says coming soon for that feature.
You then have the option to enable SSL support and AMP support and choose the last update format – Date or Date and Time. If you wish to include some inline info which will be included when you place the shortcode, there is a text editor to do so – you can also disable it here.
Finally, there is a disclaimer area to provide info to site visitors letting them know that the links are affiliate links. You can also disable this if you want.
The “Output” tab is where you can configure all the options relating to how the Amazon links will look on the front end of your site, you can set things like Title Length, Description list points, HTML formatting, Star Ratings, Pricing format, etc.
You can also choose to display the Amazon Prime logo next to a product if it’s available, choose a button type and style, there is also space for you to add your own custom CSS if you need to modify it to match your theme better.
How to Place Amazon Links
Now let’s take a look at how to include Amazon links within your posts, to add a simple text link to a product you will need to find out the article number (ASIN) or ISBN (for books) from Amazon product page. Visit the item on Amazon and look in the URL for a code like so.
Then use the following shortcode to post a link in a post or page:
[amazon link=”B00THKEKEQ” /]
Preview your page and you will see the shortcode has been converted into a link using the item’s title from Amazon.
If you want to add a product box to your post, use this shortcode:
[amazon box=”B00THKEKEQ” /]
Which will output like so:
If you want to add a bestseller list of products, you can do so using keywords or Browse nodes. Browse nodes are better so you can get the exact category to use. You can find a list of these online. Here is the shortcode to use for this. Note that you can also specify how many items to output.
[amazon bestseller=”281052″ items=”2″]
Which will output like so:
If you want to list new releases from different categories, you can do that also.
[amazon new=”B00THKEKEQ” items=”2″/]
Output like so:
You can also use widgets to place content, simply drag the AAWP widget to your desired location, choose which type you would like to display, and enter the ID:
It will then show up your front end like this:
You can also use the “Fields” option of the plugin to pull in the exact data you need, such as title, price, features, and so on so you can build more complex things like product comparison tables:
Verdict
We hope you found this hands-on AAWP review helpful. Overall, we are impressed by how this plugin works. This is a very polished and well-made plugin – everything operates exactly as it should, easy to configure with a good amount of customization options. The resulting output looks good and should fit in well with any theme you choose to use – having the option to tweak it with some custom CSS is a bonus if something is not displaying quite right for you. Including Amazon links in your posts can be quite lucrative.
We personally have earned a lot of money from the Associate’s program – if you have a website or blog which talks about products quite often, using this plugin can add extra monetization to your site. We also found that over Christmas and Black Friday sales go through the roof so by using this plugin, you should be able to make some extra money which in turn will pay for the plugin cost. We found the plugin developer-friendly and helpful in the course of reviewing this plugin so you will be in good hands if you ever require any support. Check it out!
Does this plugin have the option to localize Amazon affiliate links?
I presume not because it would be mentioned in post.
Hey Kasa, thanks for your comment.
Geotargeting is already on the list but not yet implemented due to the fact that we want to make it bullet proof especially when using caching plugins.
Best regards
Thanks for replying.
I guess users can always use Genius link as third party tool until you implement it with your plugin (if you decide to add).
Yeah I’m already aware of Genius Link and think about an integration. It seems to be a very cool idea!
Great to see an awesome plugin for affiliate marketers. Amazon is the best when it comes to build a niche blog to make money and many bloggers are making huge money. This plugin will definitely help to build a micro niche blog on any Amazon product.
Thanks for your words Santanu. We know a lot of successful affiliate marketeers reaching a huge income with the Amazon Associates program.
I have started a niche blog and I want to use AAWP plugin for generate income. Thanks for this article. I think I need standard license right? Thumbs up :)
Sounds determined Sumanta! Yeah of course you can start with the standard license and upgrade whenever you want. Thumbs up to you! :-)