Contents
- How Amazon Products Will Appear on Your Online Store
- Essential WordPress Configurations and Plugins
- Choosing an Amazon Store Theme
- Adding Amazon Products to the Store
- Finding Amazon Products to Add to Our Store
- Adding Amazon Shopping Widgets to the Sidebar
- My WordPress Site is Looking More Like a Proper Store Now
- Missing Features
Plenty of commercial solutions were made to help automate and alleviate the common challenges that Amazon affiliates face. But there are also basic free solutions that can provide you with similar conveniences.
Most of the commercial solutions out there are focused on automation and mass website production. Automation is good, and I certainly will NOT talk about free alternatives that are too tedious that they are impractical.
I will show you the way to build an Amazon niche store using free tools. These tools will, granted, give you a little less automation but in return you’ll have a lot more control to fine tune your Amazon store.
If you plan on mass producing low quality sites, this guide may not be for you.
If, on the other hand, you’re willing to put in a little effort in optimizing your websites to get them to rank higher in search engines and provide some value to the reader, this guide is just what you need.
This guide will not require you to pay for services or 3rd party software, but I assume that you already have a working and fresh WordPress installation and the recommended WordPress hosting. These are the bare minimums.
So, let’s get started…
How Amazon Products Will Appear on Your Online Store
You may be wondering, how will a blogging script turn into an Amazon store that looks like a an e-commerce site? Basically, WordPress is so advanced, it is more than a simple blogging script. It indeed can power an Amazon store easily.
The most dynamic and flexible way to insert Amazon products into your WordPress site is to create an individual post for each product. Posts are the building blocks of a WordPress site. They can be structured and arranged in an infinite number of ways.
Your Amazon products, inserted as posts, can then be arranged in a grid, sorted by any criteria, searched, added to a shopping cart, or everything else.
The theme you choose for your site determines how your products are displayed. And your choice of theme should match the nature of your store. For example, if I create an Amazon store for “office chairs”, I’m gonna need a professional theme that doesn’t use bright, contrasting colors.
To give you an idea of what we’re about to do, here’s how the final website will look like:
We’ll start by installing some essential free WordPress plugins and making some necessary configurations.
Essential WordPress Configurations and Plugins
First, enable Akismet to murder comment spammers. Then configure WordPress permalinks to make them more search engine friendly and easier to remember for your visitors. I recommend that you use /%category%/%postname%/ for the Custom Structure tags.
Now it’s time to install the essential plugins for our Amazon store.
The following plugins add a lot of convenience and value to WordPress. Here they are:
- Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu: this plugin makes WordPress admin panel navigation 100 times better.
-
Google XML Sitemaps: this submits all the pages of your Amazon store to Google and other search engines
-
Google Analytics for WordPress: facilitates Google Analytics integration with your WordPress based Amazon store
-
All in One SEO Pack: allows you to adjust your site HTML to make it more search engine optimized
-
WP No Category Base: URLs of category pages in WordPress look like http://example.com/category/black-office-chairs/. With this plugin, we can have the URLs of category pages look like http://example.com/black-office-chairs/. It’s more SEO friendly.
Visit the plugin pages that I linked to above and configure the plugins to your liking then let’s move on.
Choosing an Amazon Store Theme
I have another brief guide specifically for WordPress Amazon themes. Read that to learn more about choosing a proper theme.
For this guide, I want a toned down, professional theme…It also has to be free. So, I think Magazine Basic is an appropriate choice for my Comfortable Office Chairs website.
Magazine Basic also has a bunch of options that are useful for my Amazon store. It let’s me remove date published and author from posts. That’s good because this information is only useful for blogs — not for Amazon stores.
Before adjusting any settings and adding any content, my online store bare bones look like this:
Now it’s time to fill up my Amazon store with content and make it exciting!
Adding Amazon Products to the Store
We first have to think about the structure of our store, think about the categories and the organization of products. So, let’s first create new categories in WordPress to which we can add our products.
I’ll simply go to Google’s Keyword Tool to find key phrases with easy competition and I’ll use those for my category names. You can also use Market Samurai for keyword research and other SEO related research. So, the key phrases I selected are:
- Ergonomic Chairs
- Luxury Chairs
- Anti/Zero Gravity Chairs
- Leather Computer Chairs
- Reclining Chairs
- Cheap Chairs
- Kneeling Chairs
- White Chairs
- Saddle Chairs
So, I’ll create corresponding categories in my WordPress Amazon store.
Before we start searching Amazon for products to add to our store, let’s talk about the main plugin with which we’re gonna connect WordPress with Amazon.
Amazon Product In a Post
Amazon Product In a Post is the name of the excellent plugin that we’ll use. Let’s call it Amazon PIP for short. This plugin allows us to easily add Amazon products as WordPress posts. After installing the plugin, we simply create a new post the usual way.
Product Title and URL
I know we haven’t yet began our search for products to add to the store but for the sake of this demonstration, let’s say we already have an interesting product from Amazon. Go to that product’s page on Amazon and go to add a new post in WordPress. Then:
Copy the name of the product and paste it as the title for your WordPress post. And make sure that you have a good SEO permalink that includes the category that the product belongs to and the name of the product.
Product Description
Using the free tools in this tutorial, you have to write a small description for every product that you add to your store. There are some commercial Amazon plugins that will automatically import the description from Amazon, but think about this: if all Amazon affiliate sites are using the same description as Amazon.com, why would search engines rank the affiliate sites higher than the original source? You must write a bit of unique content to rank higher in search engines.
It’s not difficult.
I copied the most helpful review from the product’s page on Amazon and I re-wrote it. It took me about 30 seconds.
Set Product Category
Add the product/post to the appropriate category.
Set the Featured Image
Set the featured image for your product. Some WordPress themes make good use of featured images. It’ll make our store look prettier.
Configure Amazon Product in a Post
Now you should adjust Amazon PIP settings in the post edit page. Most of its settings are self-explanatory.
I would recommend that you choose Post Text becomes Description because this option will kinda blend what we wrote earlier for the description with the product details. It looks nice and professional — like this:
By the way, you can style this layout however you like using CSS. Amazon PIP gives you that option in its admin panel settings.
Finding Amazon Products to Add to Our Store
Now that you know how to add any product to your WordPress Amazon store using Amazon PIP, it’s time to find actual interesting products to add.
Most commercial WordPress plugins for Amazon have built in searching and filtering. They will display a list of products, each with an Add button next to it. If you click on the add button, the plugin automatically adds the product as a post to WordPress. Here’s a screenshot from ReviewAzon:
This allows you to quickly add Amazon products to WordPress. But then you are advised to visit each post you added, and modify the title and the description to make them your own. So, if you think about it, it’s just as much work as adding a product from scratch.
So, the search feature in these commercial plugins is kind of redundant. Why not just go straight to Amazon.com and search from there? That’s what we’ll do.
Searching Amazon.com
Now I want to fill up one of the categories in my store with products from Amazon. Let’s say first category I’m gonna fill is “Reclining Chairs”.
First I’ll browse to the appropriate category page on Amazon.com without entering any search terms.
So, Office Products > Office Furniture & Lighting > Chairs & Sofas:
Now, I’ll enter “reclining” as a search keyword and see what comes up.
You can now sort the returned results by relevance, bestsellers, price, and average customer reviews.
I’ll pick interesting products from the returned results to add to my “Reclining Chairs” category. Then, I’ll also go to the following category to look for more chairs to add:
Home, Garden & Pets > Furniture & Decor > Furniture > Home Office Furniture > Home Office Desk Chairs
I’ll do the same for all other categories on my site.
My WordPress based Amazon store is beginning to take shape now, even though we’re still a few steps away from launch stage.
Notice how I have the main key phrase of my store and the name of each category at the very top. This is useful for SEO.
So, I have filled up my store with posts/products. Now, I should add some shopping features to the sidebars to improve conversion.
If you look at the screenshot above, you see that I have Calendar, Links, and Archives — none of which is useful for an Amazon store. I’ll replace those with interesting Amazon widgets.
Adding Amazon Shopping Widgets to the Sidebar
In order to improve visitor conversion by getting people to buy products on my website, I’ll add the following features to my store sidebars:
- Amazon search box
- Slideshow of the best deals Amazon has in the category relevant to my store
- List of contextual Amazon products based on my page content (kinda like AdSense)
Amazon Search Box
Your store should have a search box to help buyers find the product they’re looking for quickly.
I have a full guide on adding an Amazon search box with HTML to your sidebar. In short, just take this code and paste it in a text widget on your website:
<form action="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/external-search" method="get"> <input type="hidden" name="tag" value="ms084d-20" /> <input type="text" name="keyword" size="20" value="" /> <input type="submit" value="Search Amazon" /> </form>
Slideshow of Amazon Best Deals
Amazon provides a sidebar widget that displays a slideshow of the best deals in a category of your choice.
To get the same results on your own sidebar, login to your Amazon Associate account, then go to the Amazon Deals Widget page and configure your widget like the screen shot below
And now if you click on Add to my Web page, you will get a line of code that you can copy to the text widget of your WordPress sidebar.
Amazon Contextual Ads
You can display contextual Amazon product ads on your store’s sidebar using Amazon Omakase widget.
According to Amazon
Omakase links will show an Associate’s visitors what they’re most likely to buy based on Amazon’s unique understanding of the site, the user, and the page itself.
(note: because my Comfortable Office Chairs website isn’t publicly accessible, Amazon cannot see the content of my web page. Therefore, my Omakase links aren’t as relevant as they could be)
My WordPress Site is Looking More Like a Proper Store Now
Now you have a basic Amazon affiliate store that is created using free tools exclusively. The store is well optimized for search engines and very user friendly. It also has some cool shopping functionalities.
Drive traffic to this store and you’re well on your way to making some serious cash with Amazon Associates program!
Missing Features
Okay, I know, this isn’t really the most sophisticated web store on the web. There probably are some features that you’d like to see here that I haven’t covered.
But the truth is: WordPress is amazingly flexible. No matter what the missing feature you have in mind is, it can probably be added to the store.
Just let me know in the comments below what feature you’d like to have, and I’ll see how it can be added.
Hi , great site and post. Personally i would use a more optimized wp theme for amazon store to work less and to be sure everything is on the right place , especially if you are not so expert with WP .I’m going to launch my wp theme for amazon hoping to help people, like me, to finally being able to set up a store properly, that convert …because i think set up the store is a step but finding the right product/ keyword and get peoples buying is the most difficult part of the game with amazon.
regards
Looking to build an amazon review products site . I am looking at the Totum theme for WordPress and would like to find a BULK import plugin that will work well with Totum which will allow importing Amazon prices,descriptions,images and ALL the reviews information for each product properly.I do not mind paying someone to create the whole site based on the products I am looking for.
Hi James,
I have replied to your email. I hope this is of some help to you.
Regards,
Toby
I just tried the theme Magazine basic with WP 3.3.2 and the right sidebar displays at the bottom of the page.
What was the last WP version you used the theme with?
I just reverted back to Magazine Basic after trying out other themes, Magazine worked best for my site… Using the most current WP version.
And everything fit’s where it should be?
Sidebar on the left, sidebar on the right?
WordPress version 3.3.2?
Yes sir.
Nice tutorial M.K.
Im having the same problem as Daisy. I enter in the ASIN as: B000NJTFPE.
Is this the correct way?
Darren, That looks like a valid ASIN to me. I don’t know why it wouldn’t work. If you figure out the reason, let us know!
Anyone want to buy BestKinectGame.com? I had it set up as an Amazon store for a while, made some money around Christmas, but I’ve since switched hosting, lost all the files and theme work I did over there, and I have other projects taking priority. I’m not even using it, I just set up a theme over there to show my father-in-law a fantasy football QnA type-site I could do for him, LOL.
I could use some cash to fund other projects, I’m a single Dad, so if anyone wants a great domain for this exact sort of thing, shoot me an offer? You can email me at ohearn dot thomas at gmail dot com.
Best of luck to everyone here, this page is a GREAT resource you can see my comments all over for a year or so.
Ouch Thomas… Can’t they recover the files for you? Even an old backup would be better than nothing? Try checking Google Cache and wayback as well.
All the best.
Dave
Excellent Tutorial!!! I have just started using WordPress and wondered if I could make a store out of it. After putting your direction into action, I had my first store up in about an hour. Not only does it look great, but it functions great too!! Your whole site is awesome!! I will be back regularly… great place to learn!!!!
Hi there, any ideas on how to remove the Read More with this theme? Id like to build a site with a combo of Amazon like links , using your instructions, but other posts for which I dont need a Read More link. I just want the Page/category to show all of what I wrote. Thanks,
Paul
How to show all categories in wordpress
There’s a categories sidebar widget that shows all the categories.
Great tutorial…
How to make Widget title in centre position (etc in this article: Best Office Chair Deals) ??
That’s a feature of the theme itself, but try to wrap the text in
See if that gives you the desired effect.
Hi – Great article. I have a question about the Amazon PIP plugin. I’m confused about AWS (sign-up needed to get keys for PIP). Are there fees connected to using PIP?
Thanks!
Hi Celine, No, there are no fees associated with signing up for Amazon affiliate program. You can sign up for free and start using Amazon PIP immediately.
I don’t think you’ve entirely understood the question – PIP requires API keys, but to get them you need to sign up to AWS. If you go through the sign up process for AWS, it asks you to enter your credit card details as one of the steps, so you can pay for the data and services you use. It does say though that you don’t pay for everything, and you only pay for what you use, and it’s mostly under a $ so it’s not too bad.
I just went for it and put in my card details, hopefully if ever I spend any money on AWS it’ll be while I’m making some!
Thanks for clarifying, Toby. Amazon Web Services (AWS) are many. Some of them are paid service. Using the product advertising API (which is what Amazon PIP uses) is definitely free, though. You don’t need to pay Amazon to become an affiliate.
Hi
Thanks for this great article.
what if i want to build a website having procuct of multiple e-commerce website like amazon.Need your suggetion in regards to list products and price of e-commerce website on my website.
Hi, maybe it’s mentioned, but I do not get the picture of Amazon in the excerpt on the first page. Where do I have to adjust the settings so the image of amazon will appear in the excerpt.
Thanks, great post by the way, changed my website completely. Just what I sought.
Hi joost, you actually have to manually download the picture from Amazon and set it as the featured image in your product posts. That’s how you get it to display with the excerpt.
ah, thanks, I had my suspicious, no prob do it all the time at squidoo.
again great info.
Is there a plugin that will get the amazon picture by itself?
Maybe by means of using the product link or something?
(Awesome tutorial)
Juan, Amazon PIP imports images from Amazon when you specify the product ID, but it doesn’t set it as a featured image. I’m not sure, but I think ReviewAZON and WP Zon Builder can set imported images as featured image.
LOVED this article. I set up my site very quickly using your instructions. The only issue I am having is that the category bar for the Magazine Basic theme only allows me to have so many categories displaying (and then the rest is blank black space). It looks like you changed it so yours would display more categories across the top. How can you do that?
I have 7 categories, but it will only display 5 of them at the top.
Hi Leigh, The way I setup the bar at the top is through “Appearance” => “Menus” in WordPress admin. I created and saved the menu then assigned it as “Main Navigation Menu”
Thank you! I actually figured out how to do it by changing the code for “theme-functions.php.” There was a little bit in there about categories list=”5″ or something, so I changed the 5 to a 9, and it worked the way I wanted it to. “)
I am completely new to all this Affiliate Marketing stuff and I am just trying to figure some things out really quickly.
You make mention of setting up my website with an Amazon Affiliate account, but don’t you need a website to signup for the Affiliate account on Amazon?
My question then is which one do you do first?
Do I setup a generic website, sign up for the Amazon Affiliate account with it, then create the Amazon links, widgets etc. after…….
OR
Do I request my Amazon Affiliate account first using some other website then setup the website as you have instructed?
Thanks
Andrew, I don’t think you need a website to sign up for Amazon Associates program.
MK’s right… my friend just got an account yesterday, he doesn’t have a website yet (nor a domain).
Hey MK,
Thanks again for the great information. Can you tell me what Amazon WordPress plug-in will do all the things Amazon PIP does but also allow you to add many items at once with all the manual work? I love Amazon PIP but want to search for a list of items and have them added automatically to my site without so much manual work. I also like the Amazon PIP format, would there be a way to keep that with any paid plug-in?
Thanks
ReviewAZON and WP Zon Builder can import products from Amazon in bulk, but they don’t work like Amazon PIP. Take a look at EasyAzon (I haven’t reviewed this plugin, but looking at the video on its homepage, I think it may do what you want.)
Thanks M.K. I’ll check out EasyAzon.
Wow – thank you so much for a truly helpful post! I’m itching to get started on my store now!
A query please – I’m an affiliate for Amazon but also for some other companies. Will the same principles apply? The other suppliers provide HTML images as well as deep links to specific products. I do realise this question is a bit off the mark, as your focus is of course Amazon. Thanks again for a great post!
Sure, you can apply the same principles to create an affiliate site for vendors other than Amazon. However, this will involve more manual work since most other vendors and affiliate networks don’t have 3rd party automation solutions (i.e. plugins, etc) as with Amazon.
OK, super, and thanks for the prompt reply!
This is a GREAT post! Thanks for all the details.
Have a questions though. How did you get each post to have a Read More at the bottom with the picture to the left of the post? When I try to insert a picture to the post it is displayed twice when I select the post to read it.
I guess what I am asking is how do I setup the Feature Images properly to look like your example?
I greatly appreciate your help.
I’m not sure why you have the image twice. But the read more and the position of the thumbnail image are properties of the Magazine Basic theme. Make sure that you fill out the excerpt in each post, too.
Thanks M.K.,
In your example, when you click through an item on the home page, do you have the Amazon product image duplicated? I am going crazy trying to figure out why I have a duplicated image. It seems like when I create a Featured Image it inserts it into the post but when going to the post both the Featured Image and the Amazon Product Image are displayed making it not look good.
Appreciate all you help.
Great site….
Finally figured it out.
Heh MK,
I finally figured it out!
Duh… I was using a URL to the Amazon picture instead of an actual uploaded pic.
I fixed it by downloading the feature image that I wanted and uploading it and THEN setting a Featured image.
Now I have no duplicates!!!
Guys, you can try the Morise Theme by MagPress (Free) as well, works very well with MK’s method and PIP.
You might wanna try adding the vertical slideshow widget on the side as well, looks snazzy.
Hi there,
I am making good progress on this – thanks so much- but am having one niggly issue which is driving me round the twist.
When I add a post, the second sidebar – column on the right hand side (where you have the does this interest you widget – is ‘moving’ to the bottom left of the page.
I am fiddling round with image sizes etc on the set as featured image etc but to no avail.
Please , any ideas would be really appreciated.
Paul
I think I had the same issue. Have you got more than 1 post published on the site, or just 1. I think it only does it while you only have 1 post. Try adding more posts and I think it will go…
Thanks AA! It was the 3rd post I was having the dramas with, once I got past 3 all was well. Cheers
I’m impressed by the detail you’ve outlined here. I’ve read it twice and plan to put it to use. Rather than having a button that says, “Buy Now At Amazon”, do you know how to add a shopping cart to the site? I’ve seen some Amazon associate sites that let users add items to a cart WITHOUT leaving the affiliate site. Then when the user is ready to checkout, they get sent over to Amazon’s site and their shopping cart already has the items in it. Are you aware of a plugin that can make this happen?
Hi Dorian, it’s mentioned in the comments below but it’s very long already hehe. Basically, the tutorial above cannot do that with the free tools. You’ll need a premium (paid) Amazon plug-in to add a cart and retain the customer on your site. You can check out MK’s list of plugins listed on the sidebar for comparison.
Dave
Ah, I didn’t see there were two more pages of comments! After reading them, it seems that yours and MK’s opinions are that it’s best to not use a shopping cart and get the visitor directly to Amazon. There was a lot of good info in this post.
By the way, I think it also depends on what site you’re running. If you’re not trying to brand your site, then not having a shopping cart system makes more sense, especially with niche sites.
However, if you have an authoritative-like blog, then you may want to retain the customer and have a cart system that only gets processed via Amazon during check out. Such system often results to more items purchased per action as it’s ‘strange’ to add more items when you’re thrown to another site.
In that case, it looks like I’ll be needing WP Zon Builder.
Dorian,
IMO there’s a better software to do amazon stores if you want a shopping cart system instead of wp-zon builder and similar wordpress stores.
I use FSB (aff) if I want to make a standalone store, it looks absolutely fantastic and professional plus the cart items gets added to the buyer’s amazon basket immediately, so instead of the 24hr cookie, your buyer now has 90 days to decide to check out their shopping cart items and you still get credit.
Dave