Building an Amazon Store in WordPress for Free – Part 2

In the previous article about building an amazon store in wordpress I talked about using the free Affiliate Easel for Amazon plugin to help you add either single or multiple items to your blog pages or posts.  These items can feature full or partial summaries and various image sizes with related item links included as well.  This article will focus on building the second part of an Amazon Store in WordPress which will be the search and landing pages as well as some additional tips.  Note, this plugin is free and you will see other bloggers touting and trying to earn affiliate income from a similar plugin which will cost you money.  The developer is relying on your generosity to either donate a small portion of your plugin time, or via paypal donation (in the future) to earn some money for his efforts.

When you install the affiliate easel for amazon plugin, I encourage you to set some time to donate for the developer to be compensated for his effort.  I think 5 minutes an hour is reasonable, but you can set between 0 and 18 minutes per hour.

After you decide how much contribution you will donate to the plugin author, lets start configuring your WordPress Amazon store.  There are 3 core parts to configuring an Amazon store in WordPress here and they are:

Product Search

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To setup a product search page for the Affiliate Easel for Amazon the first thing you want to do is create a new “Page” in WordPress, (make sure you create a page and not a post).  This page will be your “search results” page and you can title it anything you want.  You can also make your store page the same page as your search results page.

In this page you will insert some shortcode that will do two things.  The first thing the shortcode will do is set default items to list for the category you select as the “default” for the page.  The second is that when someone performs a product search it will redirect to this page and show the results of your search, not the default category you set (that only shows if you don’t search).

Above is what the default information is for the search shortcode, this will make your Amazon Store page display Books by default.  If you don’t want to use the default of books, you have to go to the Site about Nodes and find the node # for your category, then type in the proper index which is like parent category.

Example above is the node for PC Games under the Video Games index, and if I just use this shortcode and then view my page, I will see the following default listings:

You can learn about all the Affiliate Easel Shortcodes here from the developer which will allow you to customize the information you want to display and how you want it displayed.  This also includes a list of all Indexes you can use though you have to make sure you choose a node under the index you choose.

Now that you have your “search results” page you have two major ways to add product search with the Affiliate Easel for Amazon plugin.

Amazon Search Widget

The first method is to simply add the search product widget into your sidebar.  You can add this by drag and dropping the widget into your sidebar but this widget is not ideal for sidebars that are under 200px in width.

When adding the Affiliate Easel Search widget to your sidebar you can Title the widget, and also set which “page” your search results will appear on.  All you need to do is select the page you created above and you are good to go.

As mentioned above now you will have a search bar in your sidebar, and if you perform a search you will see the results of your search on the same page you previously setup.  You will only see the default node/index items you setup if you hit your page without doing a search to arrive there.  So if you search for a product like “Keurig Coffee” you will end up with search results on the page you specify in your own site.

Amazon Search Shortcode

The other way to add a search field is to use the Affiliate Easel search shortcode, you simply place this shortcode below into any post or page in WordPress.

Then you will have a fully integrated search bar in your page or post that looks like this:

With one line of shortcode you can have a full search bar integrated in your WordPress page and the results will display in the same page as long as you have AZ Easel Node & Index shortcode from the beginning of this post in the same page.

Amazon Store Results

I have only been using the Affiliate Easel for Amazon plugin for a few weeks myself, but I am already starting to see results from it.  My Amazon affiliate income is showing a higher percentage of earnings in the past 30 days at over $20 which is more in a single month than ever before from Amazon earnings for me.  I do think the plugin which I am using now on several blogs will be a viable way to monetize your blogs.  Theoretically by choosing a targeted Amazon product on each post you could earn more than AdSense potentially if you want to take the extra time to carefully select a product for each post that you do.

For those who just want to list a store front for any type of product, the Affiliate Easel for Amazon WordPress plugin make sit incredibly easy to build an entire aStore inside your WordPress blog and gives you complete control over what you want to display and how you want to display it.

-Dragon Blogger