[Plugin: WordPress-Amazon-Associate] A Few Questions

  • Resolved TheDudeAbides

    (@thedudeabides)


    13 years, 8 months ago

    Hey,

    First off I just wanted to say thanks for making such an awesome plugin. I couldn’t get Amazon Link Localizer to work and then came across this one by chance(had trouble finding via google for wordpress amazon plugin searches) which has pretty much everything I was looking for. I just had a few questions to be sure I’ve got it everything set up correctly as it wasn’t 100% clear to me.

    What does Primary Locale do exactly? I didn’t see any difference for my static links when I had links from each country site and changed my locale-they all became US(where I’m from) links. Is there any difference between using a static link and one made with the shortcode if the geoip database and associate filter are turned on? Should I enter my API if I’m just using static links? How exactly does it know whether a foreign product exists for your country – under what conditions is a match found?

    Does the cookie still set if user lands on a 404 page? Also, wouldn’t it be better instead of showing original/primary url to foreigners who have their own local amazon in event of a 404, to redirect them to their amazon search page using the product name in the url or API somehow? Amazon Link Localizer touted this feature but I couldn’t get the plugin working to test it. That way at least you might get the chance of them buying something with the cookie set vs sending them to a site foreign to them. I would think this would be preferable for people in Canada, the UK, or Germany vs buying from the U.S site.

    https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/wordpress-amazon-associate/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Matthew Denton

    (@mdbitz)

    Hi:

    What does Primary Locale do exactly?
    The purpose of the primary locale is two-fold.

    1. It determined which locale is used when searching for products within the plugin tinyMCE editor control and Quick Links Module
    2. When Geo-Localization is enabled and a product is found in user’s locale then the product is generated as the primary locale.

    Is there any difference between using a static link and one made with the shortcode if the geoip database and associate filter are turned on?
    Similar to item #2 above the only difference between static and shortcode links is that when a product isn’t found (404) for a locale the original static link will be displayed while for shortcode the link will be shown for the primary locale.

    Should I enter my API if I’m just using static links?
    If using static links there is no need to enter your Amazon Web Service Credentials, I would simply suggest putting a random string into the Access & Secret Key Fields to remove the message that will show on the wordpress admin about the plugin not being configured.

    Should I enter my API if I’m just using static links?
    Amazon uses standard url naming across the different locales. When localizing a static link the plugin does a header request using curl to determine if the page is found (e.g. amazon.com changes to amazon.co.uk). If the page is found then the link is updated if not the original link is displayed.

    Also, wouldn’t it be better instead of showing original/primary url to foreigners who have their own local amazon in event of a 404, to redirect them to their amazon search page using the product name in the url or API somehow?

    This is an excellent suggestion. I’ll put it on my task lisk to make it configurable on how users want 404s to be handled . e.g. link to primary or link to search page and if linking to search page what should be used as search as ShortCode allows for alt/title parameters.

    —

    Let me know if there are any other questions.

    ~ Matthew

    Thread Starter TheDudeAbides

    (@thedudeabides)

    Thanks for explaining! I’m excited to see what kind of international amazon clicks I get on my new sites. I also thought of some other features that may be useful to include down the road:

    1) option to rewrite url to include rel=”nofollow” attribute so sites won’t be penalized SEO wise for having a lot of affiliated links. I had this happen to one of mine before and traffic dropped off before discovering that was the problem.
    2) WPMU Network admin option to designate one blog for parent settings and cause new blogs(or existing) to automatically inherit it’s settings. I’ve only seen Yoast SEO do this so far, but haven’t tried it out in some time.

    Plugin Author Matthew Denton

    (@mdbitz)

    Thanks for the feedback, I’ll add these into my Trac project for a future release.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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