Amazon: it’s the Internet’s retail store. Here you can buy a new book, rent a movie, do some grocery shopping, or find something truly unique that you can’t get anywhere else. It goes without saying that a lot of people worldwide use Amazon in one form or another. This of course includes WordPress users.
After you’ve built an excellent website with a fantastic web design and eStore, adding Amazon to WordPress provides a great opportunity to boost your profits from the money, time and sweat you’ve put into the project.
So how can you use Amazon to build your profits? Some use Amazon for its web services and others use it to place ads on their site. No matter what the purpose, people will always ask – how can I integrate Amazon with WordPress? This article explores some of the tools you’ll need to need to start using Amazon and WordPress together as a moneymaking machine.
How Do You Plan to Use Amazon?
Are you a part of their associate’s program? Do you have content on their Amazon Web Services that you want to display on your site? How about having Amazon host your website? What do you want to do? That’s the biggest question you should answer first because what you want to do determines how you will incorporate Amazon into your WordPress site.
One thing I do recommend is to sign up for an AWS account. Depending upon what you want Amazon to do for your site, you might have to do it anyway, but it’s something that you want to at least consider anyways. For one year, they allow you to use their services for free, provided you follow certain restrictions though. You can learn more at their AWS site.
Plugins
To me, plugins and themes are the heart and soul of WordPress itself. Let’s face it, there is a plugin for a lot of things from saying Hello Dolly to livening up your site to keeping it nice and tidy. Is it any wonder that WordPress has plugins for things you want to do with Amazon? Now there is plenty of plugins that deal with Amazon interaction, so I’ll be going through a few.
- WP Offload S3
One of the biggest challenges any WordPress administrator or developer will tell you is managing your site’s multimedia files. A lot of multimedia files like jpegs, .png images, videos, and audio files can cause your site to lag. WP Offload S3 helps by offloading your content to Amazon Web Services. This way your site can just focus on loading scripts and html pages. You will need another plugin to use WP Offload S3 entitled Amazon Web Services.
- Amazon Associates Link Builder
Most bloggers or sites today have ads of some kind or another, and WordPress has always been accommodating with placing ads on your site. Amazon.com has stepped up to the plate with their plugin that is of course called – Amazon Associates Link Builder. With this plugin, you can search their catalog of products, get pricing information, and create links that you can display as an ad on your site. Naturally, you will need to be a part of their associates program. As of this writing, their plugin is in beta so use carefully.
- Amazon Link Engine
It’s no secret that Amazon has several storefronts across the world. For example, if you live in England and went to Amazon then you would be redirected to Amazon.co.uk. How does this affect a WordPress administrator? Well, it’s a little thing called conversion. A person from England who visits an American site and sees an American Amazon ad probably won’t click it because it would take them to the American Amazon store and not an English one.
Amazon Link Engine combats this problem by letting users click on Amazon ads for products and then be redirected to the appropriate store front based on their location. In short, if your site is based in America and features an American Amazon ad and if a person on England clicks on it then they would be redirected to that product from Amazon.co.uk.
- Amazon Simple Affiliate
This plugin attempts to bring all the comforts of WooCommerce to a plugin that deals solely with Amazon. Amazon Simple Affiliate allows you to design how you showcase the products you sell on your site. Included also are notifications, product catalogs, best seller lists, caching, ajax functionality, multilingual functionality, and the list goes on and on. The developers of Amazon Simple Affiliate offer a free version but to get the most out of their plugin you will have to buy their pro version.
- Amazon aStore
Amazon aStores are part of their associate program. Here you can create a private store that you can put on your WordPress site to sell products on. As stated on their site, you can create your own store in a matter of minutes without any need of programming what so ever. The creation process doesn’t take long either and they can give you the code to use to embed your store onto your site. Now a couple of things need to be pointed out. First and foremost, you need to be a part of the Amazon Associates program. Second, there can be some difficulty in getting the code embedded into your site – especially if you’re using an iframe. To combat this, you’ll probably have to install an iframe plugin.
Amazon Hosting WordPress?
I found something interesting when researching this article. You can host a WordPress site on Amazon. You can find detailed instructions on how to do so here, but sufficient to say, you need to set up an account with Amazon Web Services. You can do so free of charge and can take advantage of their services – some with restrictions – for up to one year. If you want to integrate WordPress and Amazon together then this is a way you can do so.
In Conclusion: Amazon is a Great Way to Kick Off Your eStore
As the old commercial says, “Do you want to make money? Sure, we all do.” Integrating Amazon into your WordPress site is essentially the way to go; provided of course you set up an Amazon Associates account. We can, however, see that Amazon can be used for a little bit more like letting it “carry the load” of your multimedia files. This alone says that given time we can see what other uses Amazon can do for your WordPress site.