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:

1. Lasso is a monthly subscription. Blog Fixer is a one-time fee. If you desire Lasso’s other features, this might be a fit for you. If you just want this particular problem to go away with no interruption to your site, your affiliate income, or your schedule, The Blog Fixer is likely the better fit.
2. The Blog Fixer is a permanent solution. The changes will be part of your site, not contingent upon remaining connected with Blog Fixer. If you start a Lasso subscription and ever decide you don’t want to pay anymore, you’ll have a lot of broken code and images on your site that you’ll then have to remove. (We have a fix for that.) We’ve heard from at least one disenchanted blogger who spent hours removing Lasso code from her site. 🙁

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.