How to Create an Amazon Affiliate Link (Desktop, Phone, or by Hand)

An Amazon affiliate link is just an Amazon URL with your ID in it. Amazon calls it a “Special Link”. The ID is what credits a sale to you. Everything below is about getting that ID into the link reliably, and choosing the right tracking ID while you do it, because that choice is what makes your reports useful later.

Before you start: two things to have

• An Associates account. Amazon’s policies let you put links on your Site as soon as you have applied. You do not need to wait for approval. Approval comes after your first three qualifying sales.
• The same login on Amazon itself. SiteStripe and the phone method only appear when you are signed in to Amazon as the customer account that owns your Associates account. This is the most common reason people cannot find them.

SiteStripe is the grey bar Amazon shows across the top of its pages when you are signed in as an Associate. Amazon describes it as a way to build links without visiting Associates Central.

1. Sign in to Amazon with your Associates account. Check the name at the top of the page; if it is someone else’s, sign out and back in.
2. Open the product page you want to link to. Amazon’s help is explicit that a link to a specific product can only be made while you are viewing that product.
3. In the SiteStripe bar, click Get Link, then Text.
4. Check the store ID and tracking ID it has chosen. Amazon pre-fills the last ones you used, which is how links end up credited to the wrong tracking ID. Change it if needed.
5. Copy the short link, or switch to the full link if you want to see the tag in the URL.

If SiteStripe is missing even when the name is right, it has been switched off. Turn it back on from the settings icon on the bar, or in Associates Central under Account Settings, then SiteStripe options.

Amazon’s phone method lives inside the normal Amazon shopping app, not in a separate Associates app. Amazon calls it Mobile GetLink, and says it switches itself on when you log in to the app with your Associates account.

1. Log in to the Amazon shopping app with your Associates account.
2. Open the product page.
3. Tap the Share button.
4. Above the Copy Associates Link button you will see your store IDs and tracking IDs. Pick the one for where you are about to post.
5. Tap Copy Associates Link and paste it where it is going.

Amazon’s help page on simple text links gives this format:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/ASIN/ref=nosim?tag=YOURASSOCIATEID

Replace ASIN with the product’s 10-character code, which is listed in the Product Details section of the page. Replace YOURASSOCIATEID with your store ID or one of your tracking IDs. Amazon’s help page uses http:// in its example; use https://.

The by-hand method is the one to use when you have a spreadsheet of products, or when you want a clean URL you can read at a glance. It is also exactly what affiliate plugins do in the background. The risk is typing: one wrong character in the tag and the link works perfectly for the shopper but pays nobody. Always test a hand-built link.

Which method to use when

If you publish product boxes rather than plain links, the link is the easy part. Whether the plugin can still fetch product data is now the question, since Amazon switched off its old product API in May 2026. Which Amazon affiliate plugins still work covers that. If you have no API access yet, adding products without the API shows what you can display with plain links.

How to check the link is really yours

One thing that looks like a fault but is not: after a shopper clicks through, your tag often disappears from the address bar as they browse. Amazon’s help says this is expected, because the shopping session itself is tagged. If clicks show up but sales never do, work through the nine causes of a link not tracking.

Where the link is allowed to go

Creating the link is unrestricted. Where you post it is not. From Amazon’s Program Policies, updated 14 April 2026:

• Your own Sites. Your website, your social media accounts and approved apps, as listed in your Associates account. Amazon also says you must not create links with your tag for a site that is not your Site.
• Email, SMS and direct messages, only if the person opted in. Cold outreach is out. The email list guide covers what that means in practice.
• Never offline, in ebooks or in printed material. That includes the PDF guide many sites give away.
• Never disguised. A shortener or button that makes it unclear the link goes to Amazon is a breach of the policies.
• Always disclosed. A clear label near the link, plus Amazon’s required sentence on the Site. The disclosure guide has the exact wording.

Also from the policies: do not ask people to bookmark your links, and do not buy through them yourself or ask friends to. Both are listed as breaches, and the second is the kind of thing that ends an account in its first 180 days. If your readers are outside the US, localising links by country explains how one link can pay in several stores.

Common questions