Update: I've since stopped using OneLink after I bought Amazon Affiliate for WordPress which I wrote about here and here because it's got localization built-in to it, and is also recommended by Aamzon.

Recently I wrote about how I was looking for the best Amazon link localization Worpress plugin for my travel website, which is heavily monetized via the Amazon Associates Program. I also mentioned that in the meantime, while performing my due diligence and researching the available plugins, Amazon released their OneLink service, which is a built-in redirection service that currently works with United Kingdom and Canada Amazon websites. Since I saw no inherent risk of using a service provided directly by Amazon, and since UK and Canada were my #2 and #3 countries for traffic, I decided to move forward with OneLink instead of a third party software. Although some of the other softwares available allow me to redirect traffic to additional countries (Deutschland, France, Japan, Mexico, China, Italy, Spain, India, and Brazil), I'm happy to test the waters with UK and Canada. I also feel that if Amazon is rolling this out for UK and Canada, it won't be long before they introduce the service for their other countries as well.

USA (50%), UK (10%), and Canada (5%) are responsible for 65% of my site traffic. The other 35% is divided between 123 other countries, 116 of which DO NOT have Amazon Associates Programs, and many of which do not have local Amazon website at all. So I feel like I'm covering most of my bases with these three countries for the time being.

This morning I activated OneLink and installed the code on my site. The first step was to register Amazon Associates accounts on the UK and Canada sites. That took about 10 minutes total. If this were my first time joining any Amazon Associates Program, it would have taken longer. But in this case, I could skim through the Policies and TOS because they were almost identical, and there was no learning curve to use the backend. I was able to breeze through the setup process of registering my business, agreeing to the rules, and setting up my tracking ID.

The second step was to sync my US tracking IDs to my new UK and Canada tracking IDs. That took about 10 seconds for both.

The third step was to install their javascript code into bottom of the body section of my template. Since I use WordPress, I installed this into my theme code.

Last step was to test. I reached out to a few friends who live in Canada and UK to click on my links and see if they were redirected properly to their local Amazon site. None of those friends responded to my messages so I just waited patiently for the day to pass by before checking my Analytics. And guess what? I got a sale! A $200 sale resulting in an $8 commission. Not bad for the less than 10 minutes it took to set this all up this morning. And hopefully more coming.

(The reason why it says zero fees above is because the fees are registered AFTER the item ships. But you can see that there was one item ordered. It was a $200 camera that I review.)

Ideally, I'd like to see my Amazon Associates income increase by at least 30% this coming month. I hope I'm doing the math right when I derived that number. In reality, my math doesn't matter much because there are a lot of other factors at play. Do UK and Canadian customers shop on Amazon as frequently as USA customers? Are all the products I link to on my site also available in UK and Canada? Do my buyer guides cater to American shoppers and won't translate into conversions as well in other countries? Am I just bad at math? I'll find out in 30 days and let you know the results. I'll be closely following along too.

If you haven't already, I encourage you to activate the OneLink service. If you do, let me know your results.