How to Create an Amazon Affiliate Link: Step-by-Step Guide

What you need before you start

To create Amazon affiliate links, you need an approved Amazon Associates account. Amazon reviews new applications and requires evidence of an active website, blog, YouTube channel, or social following before approving you — and new accounts have 180 days to make their first qualifying sale or the account gets closed, so don't apply until you have somewhere ready to actually share links.

You'll need:

• A live website, app, or active social media presence to list on your application
• An Amazon account (or a new one specifically for Associates — many creators keep these separate from their personal shopping account)
• Your tax and payment information, which Amazon collects during signup

Step 1: Join Amazon Associates

Go to affiliate-program.amazon.com and sign up with your Amazon account. You'll be asked for:

1. Your website, app, or social media handles
2. How you drive traffic (blog, YouTube, social media, etc.)
3. Your preferred Associates Store ID — this becomes part of your tracking ID

Approval isn't always instant. Amazon reviews the application, and in many marketplaces your account starts in a probationary state until you record your first qualifying sale within 180 days.

Step 2: Find your tracking ID

Once approved, your tracking ID (sometimes called your Associates ID or tag) is visible in your Associates Central dashboard under Account Settings. It looks something like yourname-20 — the -20 suffix is standard for US accounts, other marketplaces use different suffixes.

This tracking ID is what actually earns you commission. Every link you share needs to include it, or the sale doesn't get credited to you.

Step 3: Build the link

There are three ways to build an Amazon affiliate link:

Using SiteStripe — while browsing Amazon logged into your Associates account, a toolbar appears at the top of every product page letting you generate a link, text link, or image link with your tag already attached. This is the easiest method for one-off links.

Manually appending your tag — take any Amazon product URL and add ?tag=yourtrackingid to the end:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0EXAMPLE?tag=yourname-20

The /dp/B0EXAMPLE portion is the product's ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) — a unique 10-character product identifier. You can find it in the product URL itself or in the "Product information" section of the listing.

Using the Associates "Product Linking" search tool — inside Associates Central, you can search for any product and generate a tagged link without visiting the product page first.

Step 4: Verify the tag is actually attached

Before sharing a link widely, click it yourself (from a browser where you're not logged into your own Associates account, to avoid self-referral issues) and confirm the URL you land on still carries your tag= parameter. Some URL shorteners and redirect chains strip query parameters, which silently removes your tag and your commission along with it.

Common mistakes that cost creators commission

Sharing the product page URL without the tag. This is the single most common mistake — copying a link straight from the address bar instead of using SiteStripe or manually appending ?tag=.

Using a tag from the wrong marketplace. A .com tag earns nothing on an amazon.ca or amazon.co.uk sale — each marketplace requires its own registration and its own tag. (More on this in our guide to using Amazon affiliate links internationally.)

Letting a generic shortener strip the tag. Not every link shortener preserves query parameters through a redirect. Test any shortener you use on a real Amazon link before relying on it.

Posting the same link across every platform and country. A single flat link can't route a US visitor to amazon.com and a German visitor to amazon.de with the correct tag for each — that requires either maintaining separate links per country yourself, or a tool that does the country detection and tag-swapping for you automatically.

Keeping it manageable at scale

Manually building and tracking tagged links works fine for a handful of products. It gets unmanageable fast once you're posting regularly across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and a newsletter, each needing the right tag for each visitor's country. That's the specific problem link-management tools built for Amazon Associates solve — generating one link that auto-localizes to the right marketplace and tag per visitor, instead of maintaining a matrix of URLs yourself.