Short Amazon affiliate links - a bookmarklet / Stoyan's phpied.com

Short Amazon affiliate links - a bookmarklet

It's a pain to link to a specific product on Amazon if you have to use their UI to build an affiliate link. It's good to have nice, clean and short affiliate links. This post gives you the details and also a bookmarklet to built the links by visiting the product page you want to link to.

Anatomy of an Amazon affiliate link

Let's see the anatomy of a link in its shortest possible form.
Basically you have:

http://www.amazon.com/ - self-explanatory, I think
/dp/ - standing for "details product" or maybe "details page"
/1847194141/ - a 10 character product code, aka ASIN code, Amazon Standard Identification Number
?tag=affiliatecode-20 - your affiliate code, or tag

For example my Amazon affiliate code is w3clubs-20, and an affiliate link to my book would be:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1847194141/?tag=w3clubs-20

Amazon also uses longer search engine friendly URLs containing the book title, like:
http://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-JavaScript-Stoyan-Stefanov/dp/1847194141/?tag=w3clubs-20
But the book title/product name doesn't really matter, so this is fine too:

http://www.amazon.com/War-and-Piece-by-Stoyan-Stefanov/dp/1847194141/?tag=w3clubs-20

So I went ahead and created a bookmarklet that lets you visit the product page you want to link to, click the bookmarklet and copy a short affiliate URL.

Install the bookmarklet

Drag the link below to your favorites/bookmarks or right-click and add to favorites. Then right click the new bookmark and change its properties, replacing my Amazon affiliate code "w3clubs-20" with yours.

Amazon aff

After installing the bookmarklet, just go to any Amazon product page, click the bookmarklet and it will create an affiliate link for you to copy.

The bookmarklet code, readable version

Here's the code for the bookmarklet, simply find the ASIN (product code) and build a new URL with it.

(function(){
    var aff = 'w3clubs-20';
    if (!document.getElementById('ASIN')) {
        alert('Can\'t find the product ID');
        return;
    }
    var asin = document.getElementById('ASIN').value;
    prompt(
        'Here is the link:',
        'http://www.amazon.com/dp/' + asin + '/?tag=' + aff);
})()

Misc

There's a page in the Amazon affiliates section that let's you check if the links are OK, it's here

Sometimes you might see (usually for non-book products) URLs that instead of /dp/ have /gp/product/, but if you build /dp/ links it's totally fine, according to their link checker, see previous paragraph.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 and is filed under AWS, JavaScript, bookmarklets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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16 Responses to “Short Amazon affiliate links - a bookmarklet”

Wendy Says:
January 22nd, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Thanks for the bookmarklet. It is really useful.
Slavi Says:
May 10th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
I would like to add that this worked for me

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0340859490?tag=SOME_AFF_ID

this is linking to a product by ISBN (10 chars)
Kathy Says:
June 11th, 2009 at 3:46 am
Works for me, too. Thanks for a nifty little tool.
JN Says:
July 6th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Will this work for MP3 links that use flash? They are over 500 characters.
Mugger Says:
July 8th, 2009 at 11:49 am
For several years, I have asked Amazon for help on making a shorter link, such as might be cloaked in some fashion. They never told me about the short form you describe.
Since your short form lacks parameters in the standard generated link, do I safely get sales credit?
Mugger Says:
July 8th, 2009 at 11:59 am
By the way, how do I use your code example?
Stoyan Says:
July 8th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Should be fine with the sales credit, but do test, don’t take my word for it.

To use the code, check the “Install the bookmarklet” section of the post.

Let me know if you have any troubles.

Thanks,
Stoyan
Mugger Says:
July 8th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Still not complete understanding of script, but can do manually.
Thanks.
Short Amazon affiliate links – a bookmarklet / phpied.com - Vikram’s Link & Photo Blog Says:
July 12th, 2009 at 2:50 am
[...] [From: Short Amazon affiliate links - a bookmarklet / phpied.com] [...]
shamy Says:
September 6th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Here we are Abercrombie & Fitch Clothing retailer,sell a lot of abercrombie clothing, there may be many products suitable for you.welcome for you to come!
Paul Bright Says:
September 8th, 2009 at 1:08 am
Works great for me,

Thanks for that, it has saved me a lot of time

Paul Bright
dromenon Says:
October 26th, 2009 at 1:56 am
it works great and goes to the proper page but when i check it at the amazon link checker i get this:

Link Tagging Results
Fail: The link above was not tagged or was not a valid Amazon link.

how will this effect getting commissions?
James Says:
December 13th, 2009 at 4:56 am
Works for me when I change the affiliate tag to my own. If you’re getting the ‘fail’ message, be sure that you’re entering your associate tag or sub-tag correctly. I received that message when I spelled my tag incorrectly, but received the success message after fixing the spelling error.
Sylvia Says:
January 4th, 2010 at 10:39 pm
Genius! Thank you thank you, I think this will put years on my life.
christine Says:
April 14th, 2010 at 11:10 am
I feel silly asking this, but when I check my link, it looks like it’s taking people shopping under my name —- the page says welcome Christine at the top. Is that correct?
Toys Says:
May 14th, 2010 at 10:52 am
Is it possible not to use node and associate tag as a parameters (not to use “?” and “&” characters in URLs) and still be able to link to the proper Amazon nodes like toys and games, or others with correct associate tag?

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