WooCommerce Amazon Affiliate Products: Keep Your Catalog Clean

You run a WooCommerce store and sell your own stock. Customers keep asking about the things around it: the stand that fits your product, the refill, the book you'd point them to. Amazon sells all of that, and as an Associate you could earn on those sales without holding one extra unit.

WooCommerce even ships a product type for it. The trouble starts around the twentieth Amazon item. They sit in your shop grid next to the products you actually sell, your markup tells Google they're yours, and the prices you typed stop matching Amazon's the first time Amazon changes them.

WooCommerce Amazon affiliate products don't have to wreck your catalog, though. WooCommerce documents two switches that solve part of it, and a common pattern handles most of the rest. None of this is legal advice. Where an Amazon or Google policy matters, we quote and link it.

What the External/Affiliate product type actually does

Pick "External/Affiliate product" in the product editor and WooCommerce removes the shipping section and adds two fields: Product URL and Button text. The price and tax fields stay on the panel (WooCommerce docs).

The rest is fixed in WooCommerce's code. The product isn't purchasable, so the button points at your Product URL and nothing ever reaches the cart. Stock management is forced off. The stock status is hard-set to "in stock," whatever Amazon has.

Five ways WooCommerce Amazon affiliate products pollute your catalog

1. They show up wherever your own products do

Catalog visibility defaults to "Shop and search," so every new external product lands in your shop page, category archives and site search. Someone browsing your range has to scroll past listings that open a different store.

They reach search engines too: WooCommerce registers products as a public post type, and WordPress core sitemaps list every public post type, Amazon items included.

2. Your structured data says you sell them

WooCommerce prints Product and Offer markup on every product page. For an external product, that offer carries your typed price, an availability of InStock, your own page as the URL and your shop's name as the seller. The code has no special case for external products.

Google draws a line here. Its docs separate product snippets, for pages where people can't buy directly, from merchant listings, for pages "where customers can purchase products from you." Woo's default markup on an external product follows the merchant-listing pattern, the one for products you sell yourself.

3. The price you typed is already going stale

Amazon's Participation Requirements say your site "may only show prices and availability if" Amazon serves the link that displays them, or you get the data through Amazon's API and follow its license. A number typed into a WooCommerce price field is neither, and nothing in the external product type ever refreshes it.

You may have heard of a "24-hour price rule." Amazon's text doesn't say that. Its license asks for a date/time stamp next to the price when the displayed content is refreshed less often than hourly, plus this disclaimer, which can sit beside the price or behind a link or pop-up:

Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.

Twenty-four hours is a different clause: the longest you may cache non-image product content before refreshing it. Amazon's images can't be stored at all: you can only link to them, and keep the link for up to 24 hours. Importing them into your Woo media library is storing them.

4. No sales get tracked

WooCommerce Analytics is built from orders. An external product can't be bought on your site, so it never creates an order, and none of your Amazon sales appear in Woo's reports.

5. Google's feed and Merchant Center don't want them

Google for WooCommerce lists its supported product types as Simple, Variable and Bundle; External isn't one of them. Merchant Center's own guidelines go further: "You're not allowed to use Shopping to promote affiliate or pay-per-click links to products," with an exception for Comparison Shopping Services in CSS program countries.

How to keep Amazon items separate from your catalog

Start with the two switches WooCommerce documents. Both are per product.

Beyond the docs

Two patterns are common practice, though WooCommerce doesn't document either, so treat them as options to weigh rather than rules.

• Noindex the external product pages through your SEO plugin, so search engines leave them out.
• Take Amazon items out of the catalog. Put your picks on a dedicated "recommended gear" page, a roundup or gift guide, or inside blog posts, where they're ordinary content instead of products.

The second gives the cleaner split, in our view. Nothing becomes a WooCommerce product, so neither the shop grid nor Woo's product markup has anything to pick up. That leaves one problem: showing Amazon items on the page with prices that come from Amazon, not your keyboard.

Where live product search fits on a WooCommerce store

A recommendations page is ordinary WordPress content, and a Woo site is still a WordPress site. An Amazon plugin that works through shortcodes can run there.

PaapiPlugin is one option. It has no WooCommerce-specific integration and no Gutenberg block, and it doesn't create Woo products, which is the point here. It places Amazon products on any page or post through three shortcodes, and the plugin's admin builds each shortcode for you to copy, with a visual builder for the search shortcode.

Boxes and tables cover the items you picked. Search covers everything else, which for a store often means add-ons and consumables you don't stock. It sits well on a "Shop more on Amazon" page linked from your menu or footer, clearly apart from your own catalog.

Connect your own Creators API credentials and product data comes from Amazon's API, so prices reflect Amazon rather than a field someone typed last month. The API license still governs how you display that data, so read the terms that apply to your setup.

There's a free version you can try on a test page first. Premium Personal is $39 a year for one site, Professional is $69 a year for three and Agency is $99 a year for unlimited sites. The Product Boxes and Comparison Tables add-ons are $19 a year each, require Premium, and cover all of a license's sites in one purchase.

Before you publish Amazon items on a store

Whichever route you take, a few Amazon terms govern how the items appear.

• Add the disclosure. The Operating Agreement requires you to "clearly and prominently" state "As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases," or a substantially similar statement Amazon has allowed.
• Show a timestamp next to any price that refreshes less often than hourly, along with the disclaimer.
• Leave Amazon's content as it is. Participation Requirement 6(a) says you will not "add to, delete from, or otherwise alter any Program Content." Rewriting an Amazon description in your store's voice is the kind of change it describes.
• Use Amazon content only for Amazon products. Requirement 6(z) bars using Program Content to promote products offered on non-Amazon sites. That covers Amazon's images and text, not whether you sell your own products.
• Read the principal-purpose clause. Amazon's license bars using API content on a site without "the principal purpose of advertising and marketing an Amazon Site." How that applies to a store whose main business is its own sales is a question for Amazon or your lawyer.

Frequently asked questions