Interested in launching an ecommerce store, but don’t have a ton of capital that you can use to buy inventory? Here’s what you can do – consider setting up an Amazon affiliate store on WordPress, as opposed to a regular ecommerce store.
🛒 With an Amazon affiliate store, you don’t need to worry about (or invest in):
- Product development.
- Shipping.
- Customer service.
- Or other operational tasks.
All you need to do is to grow your traffic and make sure that your website visitors convert to paying users.
In return, you can make tens of thousands of dollars per month … and eventually sell your website, making enough to buy a yacht and spend the rest of your life cruising the Caribbean. Though, this is the absolute perfect scenario, as you can probably tell.
(For inspiration, you can read about this Amazon affiliate store called “The Wirecutter”, which was acquired by the New York Times for about $30 million dollars [1].)
Ok, we’re not actually promising you that you’ll be a millionaire right away. But Amazon affiliate stores are definitely a viable way to make money on the Internet.
Ready to learn 👨🎓 how to build your first ever Amazon affiliate store on WordPress? Let’s get started!
📚 Table of contents:
- Amazon affiliate stores vs traditional eccommerce stores
- Signing up for Amazon’s Affiliate Program
- Tips on choosing products for your Amazon affiliate store
- Building an Amazon affiliate store on WordPress
Amazon affiliate stores vs traditional ecommerce stores
The beauty of Amazon affiliate stores on WordPress is that they allow you to get started with ecommerce, without quite committing.
With traditional ecommerce stores, you need to go all in. This means sourcing your products, importing them, packaging them, and then shipping them out when you’ve received an order.
👉 With Amazon affiliate stores, all you do is publish content which will drive sales on Amazon’s website.
Here’s a demo of an Amazon link that achieves that:
Your visitor browses through your site, and when they see something they like, they can click on your affiliate link and be redirected to Amazon.
Because your visitor is now browsing Amazon through your affiliate link, Amazon can track their purchases and attribute them to you.
If your visitor makes a purchase on Amazon within 24 hours, you’ll get a commission.
Sounds easy enough, right?
Signing up for Amazon’s Affiliate Program
The first step to creating your own Amazon affiliate store on WordPress is to sign up for Amazon’s affiliate program.
You can do that by clicking on this link!
Once you’ve submitted your application, you’ll need to wait for Amazon to approve your profile. In the meantime, you can get started on selecting the products to feature in your store!
Tips on choosing products for your Amazon affiliate store
Here are a few things to keep in mind when deciding what items you’d like to promote on your Amazon affiliate store.
First, you shouldn’t be promoting anything that’s too cheap.
There’s no hard and fast rule, but I like to stick with items which are $50 and above. This gives you a way better margin than if you were to promote, say, a pair of socks which costs $5.
Secondly, try and go with products which are high in demand.
There are several ways you can gauge demand…
Firstly, there are tools (such as JungleScout!) which enable you to filter products on Amazon according to demand, estimated sales, seasonality, and more.
Alternatively, Google Trends is a free tool that allows you to look at past trends and predict demand pretty accurately.
Now that you know what items you want to feature on your store, let’s jump into the next section… getting your store up and running!
Building an Amazon affiliate store on WordPress
There are a few ways to go about building an Amazon affiliate store, but the easiest (and cheapest!) way is to use WordPress.
In short, you’ll need to set up your WordPress site, then use a plugin to add Amazon products to your store. Check our beginner’s guide for installing WordPress that will teach you how to do the former. Once you’re done, read on for the latter!
Adding products to your store using the WooCommerce plugin
Here’s where the fun starts! You’ll need to install the free WooCommerce plugin and start adding affiliate products to your store.
First, navigate to your Plugins page on your WordPress dashboard.
Search for the WooCommerce plugin, and install and activate it.
WooCommerce will now prompt you to set up your store.
Fill in all the required information and once you reach the last step, you’ll see the “Create a product” button. Go ahead and click on it:
You’ll be taken to an “Add new product” page where you can input your product name, product description, and more details.
Here’s the important bit:
Make sure you specify that this is an “External/Affiliate product”, instead of a regular product.
Once you choose the “External/Affiliate” option, you’ll see new “Product URL” and “Button text” fields.
To get your product URL, you’ll have to navigate to the dashboard on your Amazon Associates account. Search for the product in question, and click on the yellow “Get link” button. Then copy the URL, and return to your WordPress page to paste the URL in.
You can experiment with your button text further down the road, but whilst you’re still getting started, I recommend sticking with something safe such as your standard “Buy now” or “Shop now”.
Directly below the “Button Text” field are your “Regular price” and “Sale price” fields, which you can ignore. Amazon’s affiliate program policy states that affiliates should not manually enter price information, so just leave this blank.
Two more steps, and then you’re done:
First, add your product image and product gallery images.
There’s no hard and fast rule when it comes to your key product image – you can either use a product shot with a white background (if you’re going for a clean, minimalist look), or a “lifestyle” shot which features your product in a particular context.
Next, add a short description for your product.
This will be displayed on your store’s front page, as well as its search results.
That’s basically it – hit the “Publish” button, and you’ll have added your first product to your Amazon affiliate store!
Now, rinse and repeat till you’ve gotten all your products up, and you’re all set.
A final word on Amazon affiliate stores 🏁
Because you can get Amazon affiliate stores on WordPress up and running in no time, these are great for aspiring entrepreneurs who want to try their hand at ecommerce, but aren’t quite ready to quit their day job just yet.
Itching to set up your first Amazon affiliate store on WordPress? 🔥 Go ahead and sign up for Amazon’s affiliate program now.
Is there anything that’s still a mystery when it comes to these Amazon affiliate stores? Feel free to ask in the comments.
can we use the images from amazon official site or is it a copyrighted? Also, can we do these with other ecommerce sites with affiliate program?
Please I need to know Amazon Affiliate Store Builders that work as of today. Last year there was a number of controvertial store builders. Some of the ones I discovered were Associate O Matic, Covert Storebuilder, Prosociate, Fresh Store Builder, etc Thank you.
I am looking forward to build amazon affiliate site,I am sure this article will be more useful for me,keep doing this great work,keep sharing with us
will these products show up on a page that I can add many other products to? I hope I am asking this correctly, but I am curious how this shows up on my site and if I can have products be placed beside it, so its a full on page of products.
Just wanted to say that the first pic you have on the article is misleading, the buy button with he big arrow pointing to it with the $230 price tag, that goes against the amazon rules. You can’t have hard coded prices on your page. Don’t put a price in your button guys if your just starting out! Just a thought 🙂
Thanks for noticing Philippe – we’ve updated the post with an image that shows the compliant button your are talking about.
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