Links not Changing

OK once I deactivated W3 Total Cache it worked.

So is there no way to use this with a cache? It’s kind of frustrating having to choose between converting international Amazon traffic or having a reasonable site speed.

What is people’s advice on this dilemma?

I’m trying to sort out the same thing myself right now. I’ve been trying to test it using proxies in other countries, but everything just goes to the US Amazon site, even with W3TC disabled. How are you testing it for France and the UK?

With W3TC deactivated it did work for me. So that’s no longer a problem. The problem now is just that I apparently have to choose between being able to localize my links and having a cache.

Am testing for other countries by just using proxies with IP’s in those countries.

Pete, I was wondering whether it would be possible to choose Amazon.com as the default site for every visitor that is not from a country that has its own Amazon site. Any help or advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

BU810 – Try different caching plugins, hopefully one will be better written so that it doesn’t break other plugins.

Adventurenick – Do you have a link to your site so I can test it? If you are testing with a proxy you may well find it’s giving false negatives. Other people have reported this when the plugin is actually working fine.

Mortenp13 – At the moment if a visitor doesn’t have a local store then it just keeps the link pointing to the Amazon site in the original link. So if you want it to be .com, just make sure all the links you insert point to .com. There are a couple exceptions, for example Ireland goes to UK, Austria goes to Germany, etc.

Hey Pete, thanks for responding! I’ve tried several proxies and also had a friend in Canada test it out & they said it was still leading them to Amazon.com

I run Cloudflare & W3TC on the site but experimented with disabling both of them as well as all the other plugins to see if there was some kind of conflict. Still no luck.

A page on the site with several Amazon links is: https://goo.gl/9jUYr

To BU810 – if you’ve gotten it working, just without running W3TC, you might be able to still use W3TC – go to the Minify settings page and scroll down to the advanced options and try adding the JS file for this plugin to the section that says Never minify the following JS files:

Let me know if that works for you

Also Pete, do you have any proxies that you recommend for testing the plugin with other countries?

Thanks for the tip Nick, I’ll add that to the FAQ so people know how to get W3TC to behave itself. I don’t tend to rely on proxies as I’m in the UK myself so can test .com links naturally.

Adventurenick, thanks for the response.

I may have been wrong all along. I think link localizer is working even with W3 Total Cache activated. I may have been misled the whole time because when I tested it with the cache on either I got one of those odd proxies that doesn’t work for the test or I didn’t wait long enough for everything to load before seeing if the links changed. So I thought it didn’t work. Then when I deactivated the cache it seemed to work so I thought that was the problem. But it may have just been a fluke thing in the first place.

Anyway, at this point it seems to work with W3 Total Cache.

I was going to set the cache not to minify the Affiliate Link Localizer js file as you said, Nick, just to be sure. But when I went into the settings there was no place to name specific js files to exclude. That’s probably because this site is on an older version of WP with an older version of W3. Perhaps in newer versions of W3 there is a place to exclude specific js files. I tried to upgrade W3 and that just led to all kinds of problems. So I had to put it back to the old version of W3.

At this point, I am pretty sure W3 is running and the link localizer is also working.

I just installed Amazon Affiliate Link Localizer on another site that has W3 Total Cache running and it does work. I am convinced that what happened was that earlier on the other site I just got a bad proxy or didn’t wait long enough for everything to load so I thought the plugin failed when it actually worked. Anyway this is good news. Thanks for all your responses.

Glad to hear you got it working. Which proxy did you have success testing it with?

It’s not a specific proxy. I just use torbrowser and keep refreshing identities until I get one in a country with an affiliate program and then see if the links match.

Looks like it’s working on my end now, I guess some of the proxies are just so slow to load things that it took more than a few seconds for the link localizer to do its thing.

I’m using Cloudflare on my site & W3TC – Cloudflare does the minifying though, so if anyone else is wondering if this will work with Cloudflare, the answer is apparently yes.

Hopefully this will get some of the international traffic converting, in which case I’ll buy you a few pints Pete.

Hoorah, a happy ending for all ??

Thanks for keeping us updated guys.

Since activating the plugin 2 days ago I’ve noticed a very, very large increase in the number of clicks going to the US Amazon site. Before using Amazon Link Localizer I was getting a few hundred clicks a day – the first day I used it, there were 900+ clicks. It looks like yesterday there were more than 2,000 clicks.

As much as I’d love to think that my site has suddenly become the most popular thing around, the number of clicks showing up in the Amazon dashboard doesn’t really match the amount of traffic the site is getting.

Has anyone noticed this before? Any ideas what could be causing these phantom clicks?