Prior to the pandemic, Amazon was already one of the largest-grossing companies in the world, but in 2020, Amazon doubled their net income and earned a total of $21.33 billion USD, once again allowing Jeff Bezos to reign as the World’s Richest Man in 2020 – four years running. As the world’s largest retailer, with over 200 million visitors to the U.S. Amazon website alone, it’s not difficult to imagine that hundreds of billions of dollars go through Amazon every year.
E-Commerce is booming in 2021, and sellers from all over the world are trying to get a slice of that lucrative Amazon pie. Nearly 10 million sellers around the world sell their goods on Amazon, with hundreds of thousands more joining every month. According to some statistics, over 4,000 products are sold on Amazon every minute. Amazon is the place to be when it comes to e-commerce and online retailing, but what’s even more exciting is that you don’t even have to be a merchant to receive your fair share of the Amazon pie.
Alongside the massive growth of the e-commerce industry, affiliate marketing has grown to become one of the most lucrative marketing undertakings today. You don’t have to have a shop to earn an income off of Amazon – all you need to do is to have a platform, whether it’s a website, a YouTube channel, a podcast, an Instagram page, or even just a Facebook account, and you can start earning Amazon-based revenue right now – no matter where you are in the world.
Affiliate marketing mostly has to do with generating links with your unique referral ID, and then earning a commission whenever a customer uses your link to make a purchase. Promote products on your page or platform, and whenever someone from your audience clicks the link and makes a purchase, your commission gets credited to your affiliate account through the Amazon Affiliate program.
Amazon caters to a worldwide audience, and a big percentage of their products ship literally anywhere. Some countries even have their own dedicated Amazon websites like Amazon SG in Singapore. However, since Amazon is based in the United States, and the biggest chunk of those sales take place on the international platform, you’ll be giving yourself a handicap if you don’t figure out a way to tap into those international sales.
Fortunately, Amazon realized that there’s a huge market for their products internationally, and to help Amazon saturate the global market, they’ve provided their international affiliate partners with some handy tools to incentivize promotion through further monetization. One of those tools, and the most important one for international affiliate partners, is Amazon OneLink.
What is Amazon OneLink?
One of the biggest problems for Amazon Affiliates when the online retail giant started to go international was that everybody – Amazon included – was having a hard time tracking all the links and the cookies to give their affiliate partners their due commissions. Users from outside the U.S. would click on an Amazon product link, but are then redirected to their local Amazon store, and somewhere in digital transit, Amazon would lose those important referral and commission details. The result: disincentivized affiliate partners who were missing out on their commission while driving international sales ever upward for Amazon.
Fortunately, Amazon provided a solution: Amazon OneLink. The idea behind was to alter the way Amazon affiliate links handled those redirections so that commissions would still be given to the affiliates who had rightfully earned them. This works both ways. If someone from the U.S. clicks a link to your non-U.S. Amazon product page, Amazon OneLink makes sure you get your hard earned commission.
Before 2020, creating an Amazon OneLink was an arduous process that involved installing Javascript snippets, which understandably wasn’t too attractive for a large portion of Amazon’s international sellers. However, since the Amazon Affiliate update in April 2020, Amazon OneLink has been extremely easy to set up, no Javascript or any other technical jargon required.
If you’re looking to use Amazon OneLink and monetize your international Amazon product referrals, then follow this simple step-by-step guide and grow your revenue stream even more:
Using Amazon OneLink To Set Up Code-Free Universal Links
With these three easy steps, you can start monetizing all kinds of international orders on Amazon.
- Sign Up for Amazon US Account
While Amazon OneLink does work for all internationa l sellers, it’s currently only possible to set it up on Amazon US accounts. Fortunately, you can create an Amazon US account no matter where you are in the world, so if you don’t already have one, go ahead and sign up for one through the Amazon Affiliate Program website here.
- Open up the OneLink Tool and Link Your International Accounts
Once you’re signed in to the Amazon Associates webpage with your US account, check out the navigation menu and go into Tools > OneLink (the very first option) to start linking your international accounts.
- Sign Up to Various Amazon Affiliate Programs Available Internationally
In the prompts provided, select any of the available international Amazon stores you want to link to. Please note that there are currently only six (6) international Amazon stores that support OneLink, listed below:
- Amazon UK
- Amazon Canada
- Amazon Italy
- Amazon Germany
- Amazon Spain
- Amazon France
- Amazon Japan
Once you’ve selected the store you want to set-up first (you’ll be able to do all of them eventually, so pick whichever one you want to get started on first, preferably the one where you get a lot of sales volume) simply click the ‘Sign Up Here’ button to be redirected to the the specific country’s Amazon Affiliate program. Each country has its own specific affiliate network, but thanks to OneLink, you can link all of your Amazon Associates accounts together.
PRO TIP: When you get to the sign-up pages for Amazon’s international sites, you’ll notice that many of them are in the native language of the country they’re operating in. Circumvent this language barrier by using Google Translate – built-in to Google Chrome – to translate the page and fill up the Sign Up form as usual.
As you continue this step, signing up to the relevant international stores, the Amazon OneLink form will automatically update to reflect the data associated with your international accounts.
Congratulations! You now have an international Amazon account, complete with a Store ID. Take note of these as we’ll be using this to set-up your Amazon OneLink in the affiliate portal later on.
- Repeat for as Many Countries as You Want
Once you’ve set-up one international Amazon Associates account, you can repeat the process to set-up an account on any and all of the other international platforms available for Amazon OneLink. Make sure you take note of the Store IDs provided at the end of each sign-up, since we’ll be using those in the next and most important step.
- Linking Your Accounts with Amazon OneLink
So far, all we’ve done is make a whole bunch of international accounts on all of Amazon’s different websites. In this next part, we’ll be applying the final and crucial step to make sure that your accounts are all connected through Amazon OneLink.
Under “Link Your Accounts”, all you have to do is paste those Store IDs you got earlier into the form under “Link Your Store”. Click on the ‘Link Store’ button and voila! Your Amazon international account is now connected through OneLink, and you no longer have to say goodbye to your hard-earned commissions. Rinse and repeat this process for every other international store you signed up for.
How to Get the Most From Your Amazon Affiliate Links
Now that your Amazon OneLink is all set up and ready to go, you’re ready to start raking in commissions on your international sales – even when Amazon redirects them to their local stores. However, the job’s not over yet: if you want to make the most out of your Amazon Associates account, make sure you:
- Use a Geo-Redirection Tool
A popular geo-redirection tool like Geniuslink can give you so much more control over your links, which is especially helpful when users outside the U.S. click on your links.
- Always Be Checking For Broken Links
Arguably one of the worst feelings you can get as an affiliate marketer is when you have everything set up just right, confident that your leads will start turning into conversions and your conversions will start earning you commissions soon enough, and you put down the portal and wait for your more or less ‘passive’ income to start trickling in, only to find out later on – after hundreds of clicks and visits to your platform – that your Amazon affiliate link was broken and you earned no commissions. As an affiliate marketer, your links are your lifeline and are quite literally the only way you’ll be able to earn your commission, so one of the best practices to make into a habit as a marketing affiliate is to regularly check your links to see if they’re working as intended.