Update: the Blogger / Amazon.com relationship has now ended. The information below is kept for reference purposes only, but is no longer up to date.
Blogger and Amazon integration
For Blogger users, this announcement was the start of
- An Amazon Associates section on Blogger's Monetize tab
- Being able to sign-up with Amazon Associates from this tab, and
- Access to an Amazon Product-Finder tool from within Blogger's post editor: this tools makes it easy to create links to Amazon Associates products while writing a post
One key point that the Blogger documentation doesn't stress is that the integration is with Amazon.com only.
Consequences:
If you use the Amazon Associates product finder to put an Amazon link in your blog, and it's clicked by a reader from Europe, Canada, Japan, Germany ... etc, then they first go to Amazon.com (ie the USA's Amazon). But the system very will suggest (or maybe enforce) that they go to their "local" Amazon to purchase the product. If this happens, you don't get any commission for purchases they make.
An Alternative
You are allowed to sign up with each of the different Amazon's (Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.jp, etc) yourself. If you do this, you can put separate links from them into your blog. It's probably only worth signing up for ones where most of your readers come from, since you will have to display separate links for each Amazon. Here is a list of all the Amazons (at the moment).You can use the same email address and web-page to sign in to the different Amazons, however you cannot use the same password. (Which makes me think that they're integrated at some level, and hopefully this problem will go away, one day.)
The downside is that because the Blogger integration is with Amazon.com, any product links that you build with the Amazon Product Finder for the Blogger Editor will be with Amazon.com.
You need to go to the individual Amazons, and use the product builder there (or be very clever with creating links yourself) to get product links for the other Amazons.
NB If your readers aren't from the USA it's probably best to go into the Monetize / Amazon Associates tab and turn the Amazon Product Finder feature off. It will only be confusing.
To get links without using the Amazon Product Finder for the Blogger Editor, go into the Amazon site that you want links to, sign in, and choose Link-Builder. The process is fairly simple, and it gives you access to a wider range link sizes and types.
Example Amazon.com links
A text link
See how Amazon do business by reading Big Shots, Business the Amazon.com Way: Secrets of the Worlds Most Astonishing Web Business (2nd Edition)
Product links generated from the Product Finder for Blogger:
A product link generated inside Amazon.com
(Notice the different background colour: making links from Amazon itself gives you a lot more control ove rt eh look of the too.
A banner:
Related Articles:
The Blogger / Amazon.com relationship has now endedBuilding customised Amazon product links for use in Blogger.
i have gone through all the steps properly. for the last 5 days from 28 may to 3 may, amazon product review link enhancer was working properly,but now its not working,i am not even using the adblock plus etc on firefox, its even not working with IE. can you plz sort this out
ReplyDeleteHi David
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment.
I'm not even going to try to troubleshoot specific problems in this blog: I believe that the QA provided by having peer review of answers is vital, and it's not provided here.
I'd suggest that you post question over in the Blogger Help Forum (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/), or perhaps even on the Amazon Associates discussion boards (http://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/network/boards/main.html).
Good to know I am not the only one having trouble with this, I have been trying to change the settings to get Amazon.co.uk ads instead of Amazon.com ads. Now I understand this is not possible and so i will place ad links direct from Amazon.co.uk. Shame we can't have the choice of showing the contextual ads from Amazon.co.uk as this would save a lot of time.
ReplyDeleteI'm so happy to find this. As a new blogger I thought I had set it up wrong when the products were all from the US site. I've now created a UK assoc account and will have to try and figure out how to put in the links - it's a long time since I did any html editing!
ReplyDelete