Did you see the email from Amazon?
On December 31, 2023, any links created from SiteStripe with Image or Text+Image will stop working.
Not only could that lose you some affiliate clicks, but it could create gobs of broken images on your site – not a good look.
Not to worry – with our service, we’ll seamlessly replace all Amazon images that are about to break so that they don’t disappear, meaning your affiliate income won’t disappear with them!
Our fix will replicate the exact size and shape of all Image and Text+Image ads, so your formatting will be retained.
You’ve worked too hard on your site and user experience to let Amazon fill it with ugly, broken images that reduce reader trust.
As long as Amazon’s Associate program exists, you might as well earn some income from them in your archives. Your affiliate link on all images remains intact.
We’ve already heard of bloggers spending many hours deleting all these Amazon affiliate links and images from their sites. Don’t bother!
With The Blog Fixer, it will only take about 10 minutes of your time to purchase the fix, connect our team with your site, and make sure you have use of Amazon’s (free) API service.
Your time should be spent creating valuable content.
Let us fix your archives, both form and function.
It can’t get much easier than that!
To protect your site from Amazon’s Terms of Service, we remove the price and the logo from the widget.
Instant Pot Duo 7-in-1 Elec… Shop on Amazon
This Fix:
Casey Markee
SEO Expert and Founder of Media Wyse
As always, all of our fixes are provided as 100% done-for-you services without any software for you to learn.
When Amazon emailed about breaking all your images and links, they included the seemingly helpful suggestion to just “Use the API” to get Image replacements. If only it were so easy….
API stands for “Application Programming Interface”, which means they are designed to be talked to computers, not us humans.
Amazon does have something called “scratchpad” in their Associates dashboard which would allow you, a human, to send requests to the API can get back results. The scratchpad is really meant to be used by developers who are testing the API before they program their software to talk to it.
You can use it. It works. But it’s cumbersome, technical, and you have to first FIND all your links, then touch them one at a time, visit the Amazon product page, enter a bunch of info into scratchpad, and get some html back out.
Then you input that into your post to replace the about-to-be-broken image…and get started reformatting it to fit the way it used to look…using html.
But the real kicker? You would need to do this EVERY DAY in order to stay compliant with Amazon’s TOS. They won’t let you store an image link unless its updated every 24 hours.
No, this fix will only prevent your existing Amazon Associate Image and Text+Image links from breaking.
Unless you want to use only Text links going forward (which will still be available from SiteStripe), creating new Image links will require the use of a plugin that continually communicates the Amazon’s API.
Our current recommendation is to check out the Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin aka AAWP (Affiliate Link, from which we will earn some commission on purchases made).
The Blog Fixer uses Amazon’s Product Advertising API to pull the exact images of the products you want to advertise. They should look the same or nearly the same as what you have now.
We feel your pain. We can’t control what Amazon does, and if text links disappear, the Associates’ program is basically dead. We figure bloggers should earn affiliate income from Amazon as long as they can. If the time comes that they cancel the whole program…we have an inexpensive fix that can kill or replace all Amazon links on your site, so at least you can fight back in some small way.
Full disclosure, we haven’t yet tried Lasso, so we’re just reporting what we can glean from their sales pages and a few bloggers who have communicated with us. As far as we can tell, Lasso is promising a script that will transfer all of your about-to-be-broken links into a format that won’t break. No timeline promise yet.
There are 2 major differences between Lasso’s solution and The Blog Fixer:
We haven’t seen Lasso in action, so we can’t speak to the technical differences, but there’s a bit to chew on above.
Because our team needs to take manual actions to onboard each site, the fix does need to be purchased once per site. If you’re a site owner with more than 3 sites, email for possible bulk pricing.
Yes, it does. Or Amazon SiteStripe Image Fix plugin is required to remain installed after your fix. This plugin will control the display of your images and refresh them, such that you stay in compliance with Amazon’s TOS.
Removing the plugin will cause all of your replaced Amazon SiteStripe images to appear broken.
We are looking into the AAWP plugin (affiliate link, from which we will earn commission on purchases made) and so far like what we see. It’s a great solution moving forward that will optimize Amazon links and help avoid a mess like this in the future when Amazon goes off the deep end again. The Blog Fixer’s fix will update your archives and avoid broken images and links. AAWP can only help you moving forward on new posts or manually updating posts. They would work great together but don’t have any crossover that we can find.