Affiliator addon released for Firefox
April 3rd, 2008
I’ve always found it a bit of a pain to generate Amazon affiliate links. Once you’ve found the page you want to link to, you have to go to the affiliate site, log in, pick what type of link you want, enter the address and what you want the link to say. Then, after all that, you get a page with your link and a tracker image. The whole process usually takes me about a minute per link, sometimes less depending on how the network’s behaving.
Like any decent 20-percenter, I’ll gladly spend a day building a tool to save myself minutes. It’ll pay itself off in a few thousand links. Anyway, the current method of generating affiliate links has two problems:
- The generated link is long and cumbersome, filled with GET parameters.
- It’s slow.
The first problem has been solved by a variety of people, but I first saw it on Coding Horror. You can greatly shorten the URLs, from this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F
2Fwww.amazon.com %2FSamsung-SyncMaster-226BW-LCD-Monitor
%2Fdp%2FB000NBBWNU%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Delectronics%26qid%3D1207233586%26sr
%3D8-1&tag=doggettc-20&linkCode=ur2 &camp=1789&creative=9325
to this:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000NBBWNU/doggettc-20
All you need is the ASIN (Amazon Standard Item Number) and your affiliate code, which make up the last two segments of the URL.
First problem solved, but you still have to hunt through the page for the ASIN. I hunted around, and found that nobody had made a Firefox addon to build affiliate links, so I took on the task myself. The result is Affiliator, a one-click solution. OK, three clicks.
All you need to do now is find the product you want to link to, right-click the page, and:
The affiliate link is generated and copied to the clipboard. If you’re super lazy, like myself, you can choose to have your links automatically wrapped in an HTML anchor tag with the title of the item on the page. With three quick clicks, the item I showed above becomes this:
Samsung SyncMaster 226BW 22″ LCD Monitor
(A great monitor that has unfortunately gone back up in price since I bought it a year ago.)
Hopefully someone will find it useful. If not, it’ll be worth my time after 1,439 more links.
In case you missed the link above, you can download the addon here:
April 5th, 2008 at 5:39 AM
I downloaded he affiliator. I used Firefox to go into Amazon.com and right clicked on a book cover image but I don’t see anything that shows like the example you have on your site. Do I need to do anything more to get this to work?
April 5th, 2008 at 9:25 AM
Firefox can be pretty weird about where it puts the menu item. It’s supposed to put it last in the list by default, but depending on what other extensions you have installed, it may be hidden between other menu items.
What was the URL of the page you tried it on?
The Affiliator menu should also only be visible on Amazon.com, and only enabled on a page that contains an ASIN element.
April 5th, 2008 at 9:39 AM
Nancy, did you just go to the Amazon.com main page and click one of the items there, or did you actually go to the product page? From what you’ve said, I’m thinking you just right-clicked an image link on the main page, and if so, the menu item to generate the affiliate URL would’ve been disabled.
I’ll make a feature that allows you to get the ASIN from links, as well. You’d have to manually enter the title, unless it could be determined from the link itself, but you probably wouldn’t even need to go to the product page to build your link.