Features

CSV File Import

Many online stores have an affiliate system, but do not offer an API for it. Instead, they provide their product data as CSV data. ASA2 provides the option to import such external CSV files in the Data section of a store, create products from them and have them updated automatically. Once set up, the products are always up-to-date.

Due to the built-in specialization for Awin.com data feeds, ASA2 allows you to easily integrate advertisers of this extensive affiliate network.

PA API 5.0 Support

Amazon has renewed its interface that provides product data to its associates. Since March 9, 2020 only version 5.0 is supported by Amazon! It features a new data exchange format that speeds up communication. ASA2 supports PA API 5.0 and is constantly adapted to its new features.

Shops and Products

ASA2 is no longer limited to using the Amazon Affiliate program. With the Shops feature you can extend ASA2 with other affiliate program providers. Shops make it possible to assign products in ASA2’s dedicated products section to a shop.
ASA2’s managed templates are shop sensitive and can display the respective shop logo for a product.

Managed Templates

ASA2 includes a variety of customizable templates ready for use. The best part is, they are kept up to date with every ASA2 update, so you never have to worry about them yourself, e.g. in terms of HTML or CSS improvements.

If the managed templates meet your requirements, you can stick with them and never care about updating templates over time to support newer browser or HTML / CSS versions. ASA2 will do that for you! Otherwise you may use them as a starting point for your own templates.

Products Section

ASA2’s products section is probably the major feature of the premium version. Here you can manage and organize your products with categories and tags. You can change the title or add custom content just as you know it from other WordPress posts. All this custom data, even custom fields, can be used in your product templates.

Additionally the products serve as a performance layer between your server and the Affiliate API. ASA2 loads the product from the WordPress database within a customizable lifetime, making a request to the external API unnecessary. This results in a better page load time!

Rating Stars

We all know the effect rating stars have on the buyer decision process. To achieve a higher level of trust for your visitors, you can access Amazon’s rating stars images with ASA2 and place them in your product templates. ASA2 supports the CustomerReviews values Count and StarRating introduced by PA API 5 and features an advanced ratings mode with a dedicated cronjob if your account is not eligible for the API values.

Customizable Templates

The managed templates offer a variety of options for adjusting their appearance, thus allowing anyone without programming skills to customize the look of embedded products.

With a few clicks you can change the image size of the main product image, activate a slideshow for all other product images, set an image hover or lightbox effect or simply change the border color. The best is yet to come: All options can be used as shortcode option to individually adjust single embedded products.

Single Image

With ASA2 you can integrate single images from all available Amazon product pictures into your pages. Simply select the option “Image only” in the tab “Shortcode” in the product picker after selecting a product.

In addition, you can select one of the available image sizes that best fits your content. Width and height can even be adjusted individually with the short code options “width” and “height“. Together with the align option, the images can be optimally integrated into the page’s body text. Of course you can create own layouts.

Keyword Search

With the shortcode [asa2_keywords] you can dynamically display the results of an Amazon product search on your site. A number of search filters are available for this purpose, with which the results can be adjusted, e.g. by specifying the product category (Search Index), by narrowing the price range or by specifying a minimum customer rating. This is the easiest way to automatically display new, targeted products on your site.

EU-GDPR / EU-DSGVO compliance

Adhering to EU-GDPR / EU-DSGVO is very important for ASA2! It is therefore designed from the ground up in terms of data protection. ASA2 does not store any data of website visitors, neither personal data nor tracking data. It does not generate cookies. It also does not use any external services or sources. By using the feature “Local images” even the transfer of the visitor IP address to Amazon image servers can be stopped.

For more up-to-date information on EU-GDPR, check out this blog post:

Local Images

ASA2 has the ability to download external Amazon product images to the local WordPress Media Library and use the internal URLs before delivering the contents to the visitor. This keeps the visitor IP on your server. ASA2 does not pre-download all images provided by the API, but only those used in templates to not blow up the local data volume. Check out the online documentation page to learn all the details.

Product Picker

ASA2’s powerful product selector helps you find the right Amazon products directly in your WordPress post editor.  Additionally, it creates the right short code for you. 

Dynamic Templates

ASA2 uses templates to render products on a page. A template basically is a piece of HTML and CSS. You can create as much custom templates as you like in an easy to use backend editor. Choose from a variety of placeholders to include the product data in your templates.

With ASA2 you can even create conditional templates. Use its powerful template syntax to filter placeholders, loop through array data like image sets, decide what to display with if / else statements or even use WordPress internal functions to retrieve data.

Internationalized Products

ASA2 is able to recognize the origin of a visitor and to load the product from the Amazon store of the country of his origin. Hence you will not miss any sale!

ASA2 tries to determine the user’s country by his/her IP address. If the country is one of Amazon’s supported Product Advertisment API countries and the ASA2 Repo product is prepared for internationalization (i18n), ASA2 loads the respective product dynamically.

This product includes GeoLite2 data created by MaxMind, available from https://www.maxmind.com.

Multiple Associate IDs

With ASA2 you can manage multiple Amazon Associate IDs for different country stores in so called “Associate ID sets”. In combination with internationalized products, ASA2 automatically determines the right Associate ID to use.

In ASA2’s shortcodes you also can use different Associate IDs manually of course.

Notifications

ASA2 can notify you via email about not available products. Do not miss any sale when visitors click products which can not be purchased currently.

You can set up multiple notification rules, not only for unavailable products, based on the data of your Repo.

Collections

With collections you can bundle an unlimited amount of products into one collection container identified by a name of your choice. To embed this bunch of products in your pages, you only have to insert the shortcode [asa2_collection] with the name of your collection.

Template Translations

ASA2 includes a custom solution to translate templates. You can perfectly adjust the templates to internationalized products and visitors. You do not have to rely on third party translation plugins. Because ASA2 attaches great importance on performance, there is a dedicated cache for the translations.

Multiple Stores

With ASA2 you can use multiple Amazon stores simultaneously. Just add the option “country_code” to the shortcode with the store ID of your choice. If you use the Product Picker, it will set the country code automatically. If no country code is set, ASA2 uses the configured default.

Caching

ASA2 utilizes multiple caches: template, object, translation, keywords and Associate ID sets cache. They can be configured independently to meet your demands. If your server is configured appropriately, you can even use PHP “Memchached” to store the cache data in the server’s RAM.

Cronjobs

Optimize the access time of your pages by pre-loading product data via server side cronjobs. Use the item refresh cronjob to automatically update the items in your ASA2 Repo. It features many options to be able to controll what to preload exactly, e.g. only products of certain categories and/or tags. The results can be logged to a local file.

Furthermore ASA2 has cronjobs to refresh the Amazon RSS feeds and to send notifications. All those jobs can be processed on the server to prevent front-end overloading.

Many Options

ASA2 comes with a lot of options which let you customize the powerful functions of this plugin to your needs. For example, you can select the format of shop URLs, decide if shortcodes of other plugins should be supported in ASA2 templates, make ASA2 https ready, adjust placeholder behavior and much more.

To learn more about all available options of ASA2, please check the documentation page.

SEO ready

ASA2 was developed with SEO in mind. When activated in the options, you can use ASA2 shortcodes to populate SEO information, like page title and description. Currently ASA2 supports Yoast SEO. Support for other popular SEO plugins will follow with future updates.

More more details about the SEO options, please check the documentation page.

AJAX

ASA2 is fast because of its Repo layer, the caches and the cronjobs. You may even improve page load times by loading products via asynchronous AJAX requests. Optionally with nice CSS3 loading animations. You can activate the AJAX mode globally for all products or per product via a shortcode option.

HTTPS ready

Search engines prefer sites using an HTTPS connection. ASA2 is ready for that by default. You do not need to configure anything.

WPML ready

ASA2 is compatible with WPML. You can use it to translate your product templates. If a visitor switches the language of a page, ASA2 templates will be translated too.

Multisite ready

ASA2 is compatible with WordPress multisite installations in any form of license. On the network admin page you can find the license activation page. The ASA2 admin pages and the ASA2 Repo will be available on every single site of the network.

Developer friendly

No one wants to be annoyed by license activations on local test sites. ASA2 is developer friendly and licenses on local development domains and IPs can be activated without counting towards the activation limit totals.

ASA2 provides public PHP functions which can be accessed from your theme or plugin. With your help, we will constantly improve ASA2’s public API. For more details about the PHP functions, please check the documentation page.

Translated Admin Pages

ASA2’s admin pages are prepared for translation. Currently ASA2 gets shipped with english and german language files. If you want to help us translating into your mother tongue, please contact us.

Amazon Product Advertising API

ASA2 supports all Amazon stores which are connected to the Affiliate API. Currently those are:

• Australia
• Belgium
• Brazil
• Canada
• Egypt
• Germany
• Spain
• France
• India
• Italy
• Japan
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• Poland
• Saudi Arabia
• Singapore
• Sweden
• Turkey
• United Arab Emirates
• United Kingdom
• USA

So you are able to not only make money with visitors from your home country, but register for all Amazon affiliate programs around the world and build international websites with ASA2’s internationalization feature.