How to Build an Amazon Affiliate Store Using WordPress

Running a store can be hard. Even if you don’t have to put up a physical storefront and you decide to keep your retail operation strictly online, you still have tons of things to worry about. Unless you’re selling digital goods, having enough storage and staying well-stocked can be challenging. Having to ship the things people buy from you is another activity you could likely do without.

There are ways you can focus only on making the sale and leave the inventory and shipping concerns to someone else. Running an Amazon Affiliate Store is among the more popular ways of running what is essentially a retail business while focusing only on marketing and making the sale. The first step towards that goal would be creating an affiliate website with an affiliate WP theme or turning a site you already have into an affiliate store with the help of affiliate marketing Plugins.

What Is an Amazon Affiliate Store?

An Amazon Affiliate Store is an online store that lists external products, i.e. products that aren’t bought from the online store — the users make the purchase on Amazon. What you have is basically a digital storefront you can brand and promote, and you get a certain percentage of every purchase that goes through your website as commission.

Amazon’s always been big on affiliate marketing. And affiliate marketing has long been one of the go-to methods to monetize web assets with decent traffic. So people who own blogs, for example, can place affiliate links in their content and earn a commission on sales.

Having an Amazon Affiliate Store is just like that. Your part of the deal is to secure traffic to the website — to get people to see the products you’ve listed in your store.

What Do You Need to Create an Amazon Affiliate Store?

It’s very easy to create an Amazon Affiliate Store, but you will need to do a couple of things to get there. Most importantly, you should know that you can open an affiliate store with very low startup costs and next to no overhead — if you’re willing to put in a lot of work into things like getting organic traffic, creating content for search engine optimization, and things like that.

If you’re providing the elbow grease, the other things you cannot do without when opening the store are:

• A website — you won’t get far without it. Any website would do, but if you have any choice in the matter it would be best if you used a WordPress website. The number of themes and plugins you can pick from to customize a WordPress website is staggering. It’s no wonder so many of the websites you see every day use WordPress.
• An Amazon account — you have to register with Amazon if you want to be a part of their affiliate program. The registration process is simple and straightforward, and Amazon has gone the full length to provide you with all the relevant information when joining the program.
• WooCommerce plugin — let’s face it, if you’re making any kind of WordPress store, you might as well use the WooCommerce plugin for it. It’s free and easy to install and activate, and if its popularity is anything to go by, you should be happy with what you get from it. Most importantly, it will work perfectly well for an Amazon Affiliate Store.

How to Set Up an Amazon Affiliate Store with WordPress and WooCommerce

Let’s say you already have a WordPress website. You’ve also looked up a couple of themes that support WooCommerce, and you’ve chosen and installed the one that with the look and feel you’ve envisioned for the store.

The next step would be to install the WooCommerce plugin. You can do that just like you would with any other plugin: find it, install it, and then activate it.

After that’s done, you should join the Amazon Affiliate program if you haven’t already. Simply go to the program’s front page, and click on the “join now for free button” you’ll see in the upper right-hand corner.

You’ll take care of a couple of important things during the signup. First, you’ll need to create an Amazon account if you don’t already have one. If you do, you’ll skip straight ahead to creating your Amazon Associate account.

You’ll need to provide information about your account, your website (or other assets you plan to use for affiliate marketing), desired store ID, information about your website’s sources of traffic, your phone number, and the desired payment method. With that, you’d have created an Amazon Affiliate Account.

After creating the account, you’ll be redirected to your Associate page. This is the place where you can find the statistics about your sales and earnings, but also products you can add to your store. So when you make a couple of picks, it’s time to head back to your website and add those products in the WooCommerce plugin. But don’t close the tab with your Associate page yet, you’ll need to come back for the affiliate links.

Adding Products to Your Store

When you’re adding a product to WooCommerce for the first time, you’ll notice that the plugin lets you choose between different types of products you can place into the store. Products you’re selling as an Amazon Affiliate belong to the external/affiliate type of product. You should pick this option from the “product data” dropdown menu, which appears below the fields where you’ve named and given a short description to your product:

Changing the product type also changes the fields you have to fill out, so the ones you need for your affiliate product will only become available after choosing the correct product type.

The most important of the fields is the “product URL” field. This is where you place the affiliate link for the product you want to sell in your store. So head back over to your Amazon Affiliate page, find one of the products you’d like to sell, click the “get link” button, and copy the link you get into the “product URL” field.

The next field you have to fill out is “button text”. This is where you choose the words that appear on the button that leads a customer to Amazon where they can buy the product. By default, the copy is set to “Buy product”, but you can change it to something more enticing.

You should leave the following two fields empty. Amazon doesn’t allow you to set prices as an affiliate, so including a regular or a sale price in your listing is unnecessary.

Finally, you should add some images to the listing. You can get these images from Amazon, but you can’t just copy them. Your best bet would be to use the SiteStripe to get links to product images. Alternatively, you can use plugins that generate URLs to the images you need. Either way, you should add the images here:

After going through all these steps, your listing should look something like this:

If you’re happy with the images and the copy, you can move on to adding other products to your Amazon Affiliate Store. So rinse and repeat until you’ve populated your store with all the products you want to sell.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

Setting up your own Amazon Affiliate Store is a great way to start a business on a shoestring budget and with no physical premises to store inventory. But as is the case with many other low-cost business endeavors, you’ll still have to invest significant time and skill to lift it off the ground. With an Amazon Affiliate Store, it all starts with building a store and adding the products. So up and at ‘em, and good luck!

We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!

• How to Create an Online Store With WooCommerce (Full Guide)
• 30+ Trendy eCommerce WordPress Themes for Any Business
• Creating WooCommerce Product Tags and Categories