Everything you need to build an Amazon Affiliate site with WordPress, including themes and plugins.
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways of making money online. Recently, Amazon’s affiliate program has been gaining ground at an increasingly fast rate, thanks to its rapid expansion into a bunch of new countries.
With many ready and willing to become affiliates of one of the biggest eCommerce sites in the world, there are a lot of people looking for a quick way to get their affiliate businesses up and running with minimal fuss. So, today we’ll cover the basics of what you need to get started, and some of the premium Amazon affiliate marketing WordPress themes and plugins on offer.
The first thing you need to know about is WordPress, which is the CMS of choice for most affiliate marketers, thanks to its easy-to-use nature and effective SEO capability. It’s a safe bet to assume this stable platform will be right for you, as it has been, and remains so widely used by websites of all kinds.
What to Look for in a WordPress Theme
Picking a WordPress theme sounds easier than it looks. That’s why we’ve put this guide together to help.
A lot of people get overwhelmed by the plethora of options available when searching for WordPress themes on their own. It can be confusing trying to figure out whether you need a general eCommerce theme, a more focused affiliate theme, specifically tailored to Amazon, or a multipurpose theme that can technically do everything, but might be tricky for a newcomer to use.
The aim of this guide is to pair you with the best theme, and/or plugins you need to be the best Amazon affiliate you can be.
You’ll need a theme that’s:
- Compatible with Amazon: Pretty obvious. Some themes will be designed specifically for that market and affiliate program, others will have it as an option among others, like eBay.
- Secure: Up to the WP security standards, with regular updates released.
- Responsive: Websites can’t not be responsive these days. Your theme not working well on mobile will negatively affect your ranking on Google, not to mention the experience for customers who probably won’t return.
- Relevant features/options: Will your customers want to compare products by price in search results? Ask yourself questions like these, and make sure those features are included on the theme you ultimately choose.
- Easy to configure: Think of your own skillset, and be realistic about it. If you’re not so technical, and you’re not keen on hiring a developer, perhaps a drag and drop style theme will better suit you, and perhaps not a multipurpose theme.
- Fast loading: You’re primarily showing images and write-ups of products. You want that stuff to be the focus, rather than a flashing banner or 3D rotating logo. I’m exaggerating, because I know you’d never do such things, but make sure your site doesn’t waste power loading anything unnecessary. Again, slow load times will affect your Google ranking. Aim for an experience that’s buttery smooth. Perhaps even prioritize Google AMP compatibility to improve the mobile experience.
- Well-designed: So, if someone’s going to buy from your site rather than Amazon itself, your site better look good. Amazon is a big marketplace that prioritizes – today, at least – speed and information over prettiness. Have a point of difference from that. Give your visitors a reason to choose your site over another’s, including going straight to Amazon itself.
Top WooCommerce Themes & Plugins
Amazon affiliate themes are, in most cases, just normal eCommerce affiliate themes, but some have features built specifically for the Amazon experience.
The below list is made up of items that are popular and quite beloved, and some that are hidden gems, and less well known.
Kingdom is an affiliate theme, built specifically for Amazon affiliates.
It’s still relatively new to the market, and features a fresh design that’s fully responsive, meaning it’s great on both mobile and desktop. While it comes with all the necessary customization options, it uses color sparingly, utilizing a lot of whites and greys to ensure the product is the star.
It offers WooZone, WooZone Contextual, Discount Finder, and Kingdom Store, all free of cost.
It comes bundled with the Visual Composer page builder and Slider Revolution, which saves you $59.
It’s incredibly flexible, with custom shop page options, where you can adjust each feature to your requirements, including displaying as many products as you want with no limit.
It’s also a good fit for newcomers, with dummy websites that you can import your content directly into available, as well as access to a vast library of Revolution Sliders and Visual Composer templates on offer.
Simple and easy-to-use, yet, flexible and customizable. If you’re after a fresh Amazon focused affiliate theme, ‘Kingdom’ could be for you.
REHub is an incredibly well-regarded affiliate theme, that, being a hybrid theme, works for affiliate programs of multiple marketplaces, including Amazon.
It’s easy to start using out of the box, as a bunch of great features are bundled in with it. You can do everything, including house a directory, locator, price comparisons between multiple vendors (think eBay compared to Amazon), as well as deals and coupons.
It’s also easy to customize, with Visual Composer bundled in with it.
It has shortcode support, giving you the ability to quickly reveal buttons, show countdowns, price tables and much more.
And it’s fast loading, optimized for speed, and supports Google AMP, making it ideal for SEO.
Focusing on Amazon features specifically, REHub has more than 12 offer blocks for Amazon offers, including:
Product cards (compact and more detailed):
Fully responsive price comparison charts:
Price history, auto-updated by Amazon:
And much more.
It’s a comprehensive theme that will work well for affiliates from the world of Amazon, and beyond.
The creators of this theme have thought first and foremost about speed. And, with a current speed score of 92, that thinking seems to have paid off.
As its name suggests, it’s an ideal theme for price comparison, and works well as an Amazon affiliate theme.
It has a modern design and is fully responsive. It contains a widgetized homepage, with adding and removing content being as simple as dragging and dropping.
It also allows you to create an unlimited range homepage templates, unlimited color variations, choose between more than 600 Google fonts, and implement themes from an extensive library of options.
You can choose the way you display products, be it in grid or list style, with one click.
There are a number of style variations on offer to you, when it comes to single product page layouts.
It also comes with 30 unique shortcodes, which you can use in blog posts, pages and even products.
Its includes payment options such as, PayPal, Stripe, Skrill, Ideal and Bank Transfer.
‘Stored’ is an eCommerce theme focused on putting your products front and centre.
It’s built to work with Cart66, an eCommerce plugin built to work with the Amazon affiliate program.
It features Cart66 cloud integration, is localization ready, has six different design feels – both dark and light colored – jQuery slider, hover effects, responsive widgets on the homepage, auto-generated product galleries, and a dedicated affiliate mode.
It’s easy to setup and offers great support.
This is one of the most popular Amazon affiliate plugins you can integrate with an eCommerce site. It lets you import Amazon products into your store and earn a commission. It also has a search and bulk import module to allow you to search by category or keyword.
Using the “Synchronization Module” will keep products updated on your site.
The previous plugin is actually included in a bundle which also includes:
- WooZone Contextual – Amazon Advertising Plugin
- ADF – Amazon Discount Finder for WordPress
- Kingdom – WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates theme, which you’ll recall from the above list of themes
This is a collection of premium tools that are essential to becoming an Amazon affiliate. Not only does it come with the plugins you need, but it comes with a theme that ties them all together. This is a great option for a new affiliate who wants to get everything organized in one fowl swoop. And if you want to learn more about it, check out our deep dive about it.
Amazon eStore’s signature feature is a module called ‘Auto Import,’ which helps you import products automatically. You can also set up how often it imports products, and schedule specific times to do so on a recurring schedule.
It also imports product images straight from Amazon’s CDN, which integrates with other Amazon Web Services products to give you an easy way to accelerate content to end users with minimal usage requirements. This will allow you to import products from Amazon faster, and speed up the load times of your site.
Most Amazon affiliate websites write product reviews with links to Amazon, but a lot of them use ugly looking boxes, and spammy looking affiliate buttons with low click-through-rates (CTR).
‘Let’s Review’ is a powerful, premium plugin that promises to increase affiliate CTR by offering modern looking reviews in multiple, beautiful styles, with alternatives to those less attractive affiliate buttons included.
Users can use some of the plugin’s shortcodes to see a summary list that compares existing reviews. And, according to the creators, many Amazon affiliates have noticed an increase in their income, thanks to the plugin.
‘Wordpress Automatic Plugin’ allows you to import products from Amazon on complete autopilot for chosen keywords and categories.
What makes it unique is its ability to grab items from Amazon for specific search terms. By default, Amazon returns a maximum of 100 items per API search query. But, ‘Wordpress Automatic’ goes breaks this limitation, allowing you to grab items from Amazon that aren’t returned using the regular API.
It also support WooCommerce on the fly, so items created get added with price, image galleries and reviews.
This plugin also works with affiliate programs of other sites like eBay and ClickBank.
The right tools for you
Whether you’re new to the world of eCommerce, or not, you should be able to find the tools that are right for you to get started as an Amazon affiliate in this list.
Remember to be honest about your current skills, and give yourself and your customers the best chance of having a good experience with your website. Do that, and you’re sure to find success. Check out Templates Kits, a new WordPress category on Envato.
