Daily Zero Waste Affiliate Product Cards

Display affiliate products as grid cards, comparison tables, or Quick View popups — with ratings, click tracking, and Amazon/eBay import.

EXTERNAL SERVICES

This plugin’s core features (manual products, layouts, shortcodes, click
tracking, the disclosure shortcode) work entirely on your own site and
contact nothing external. The following external services are used only for
specific, optional features you choose to configure:

Amazon Creators API (operated by Amazon)
Used only if you enter Amazon credentials in Settings > Amazon and use
Import Products or Auto-Sync. Your Amazon Associates credentials and search
terms/ASINs are sent to Amazon’s API (api.amazon.com and creatorsapi.amazon)
to retrieve product data.
Terms & Privacy: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/agreement
https://www.amazon.com/privacy

eBay APIs (operated by eBay)
Used only if you enter eBay credentials in Settings > eBay and use Import
Products or Auto-Sync. Your eBay application credentials and search
terms/item IDs are sent to eBay’s API (api.ebay.com or
api.sandbox.ebay.com) to retrieve product data.
Terms & Privacy: https://developer.ebay.com/join/api-license-agreement
https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/member-behaviour-policies/user-privacy-notice-privacy-policy?id=4260

ipapi.co (operated by ipapi.co, a third party)
Used only if you enable Geo Links in Settings, and only as a fallback when
your host/CDN doesn’t already provide a visitor’s country (Cloudflare,
CloudFront, and similar are checked first and used instead when available).
When it is used, a visitor’s IP address is sent to ipapi.co to determine
their country so the correct storefront link can be chosen. Results are
cached for 24 hours to minimize requests.
Terms & Privacy: https://ipapi.co/

INSTALL

1. Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin > choose the .zip > Install Now > Activate.
2. A new “Affiliate Cards” menu appears in your admin sidebar.

ADDING A PRODUCT (FREE)

Affiliate Cards > Add New:
– Title = product name
– Featured Image = product photo
– Main editor = product description
– Details box: price, original price (crossed out), rating (0-5, half stars
allowed), badge (preset dropdown or custom), affiliate link, button text,
“Why We Like It” and “Why We Don’t Like It” (one point per line)

A Live Preview panel on the right shows exactly how the card will look, in
either layout, updating as you type — before you even save.

INSERTING INTO ARTICLES

Easiest way — Affiliate Cards > Shortcode Builder:
Tick the products you want, pick a layout, copy the generated shortcode.

Gutenberg blocks:
– “Affiliate Cards Product” — one product, pick the layout in the sidebar
– “Affiliate Cards Comparison Table” — type product names to build a table

Shortcodes:
[dzwapc id=”123″ style=”grid”] single grid card
[dzwapc id=”123″ style=”horizontal”] single horizontal row
[dzwapc id=”123″ style=”popup”] Quick View popup
[dzwapc_row ids=”12,15,18″ style=”grid” columns=”3″] several side by side
[dzwapc_table ids=”12,15,18,20″] comparison table
[dzwapc_disclosure] FTC affiliate disclosure

CLICK TRACKING (FREE)

On by default. Buttons link to yoursite.com/?dzwapc_go={id}, which logs the click
then instantly redirects to your real affiliate URL — visitors never see an
in-between page. Counts appear in a sortable “Clicks” column under
Affiliate Cards > All Products. Turn it off in Settings if you prefer
direct links.

AMAZON & EBAY AUTO-IMPORT

Import products from Amazon and eBay instead of typing them in — this
requires your own Amazon Associates and/or eBay Partner Network credentials
(free to obtain from Amazon/eBay), not a subscription to this plugin:

• Search Amazon or eBay by keyword from your dashboard
• Or paste any Amazon/eBay product URL (short links like amzn.to work too)
• One click imports title, image, price, and your affiliate link into a new
  product, with the image sideloaded to your Media Library
• Popup / Quick View card layout

Note: neither API returns star ratings, so add ratings, badges, and pros/cons
yourself after importing — that’s your editorial judgement anyway.

Amazon credentials

IMPORTANT: Amazon retired the old Product Advertising API (PA-API 5.0) on
15 May 2026. This plugin uses the replacement Creators API. Your old
AWS Access Key / Secret Key will NOT work.

Get a Credential ID and Credential Secret from Associates Central under
Tools > Creators API, and enter them with your Associate/Partner Tag in
Settings > Amazon. Amazon requires 10 qualifying Associates sales in the
trailing 30 days to keep API access active.

eBay credentials

Get an App ID (Client ID) and Cert ID (Client Secret) from the eBay Developers
Program at developer.ebay.com, and a Campaign ID from the eBay Partner
Network. Without the Campaign ID, imported eBay links will not earn
commission. Enter all three in Settings > eBay.

SMART PRODUCTS: AUTO-SYNC, GEO LINKS, LINK HEALTH, ANALYTICS

Auto-Sync (Settings > Auto-Sync)

Products imported from Amazon or eBay keep themselves up to date: price,
availability, affiliate link, and image. Amazon’s operating agreement
requires displayed prices to be current, so leaving this on is what keeps a
price-displaying site compliant.

• Runs on WP-Cron, 10 products per run, oldest-first, to respect API limits
• Per-product toggle in the “Smart Product Sync” box on the edit screen
• Out-of-stock products are flagged so you can spot dead weight
• “Sync a batch now” button for manual runs

What sync does NOT touch: star ratings, badges, and your pros/cons. Neither
Amazon’s Creators API nor eBay’s Browse API returns customer ratings any
more, so anything you wrote stays exactly as you wrote it.

Note: WP-Cron only fires when someone visits your site. On a low-traffic
site, set up a real server cron hitting wp-cron.php for reliable timing.

Geo Links (Settings > Geo Links)

Sends US visitors to amazon.com, UK visitors to amazon.co.uk, and so on,
using the right tracking tag for each country.

How it avoids the usual caching trap: most geo plugins bake a country-
specific link into the page HTML, which then gets cached and served to
everyone. This plugin decides the destination inside the /?dzwapc_go= redirect,
which is never cached — so it stays correct behind full-page caching,
Cloudflare, or any CDN.

IMPORTANT: you must join each country’s Amazon Associates programme
separately to earn commission there. Only countries where you enter a
tracking tag are localized. Everyone else keeps your default link, so
traffic is never sent somewhere you cannot earn from it.

Country detection uses your CDN’s header first (Cloudflare, CloudFront,
Vercel, Nginx/Apache GeoIP) which is free and instant, falling back to a
cached IP lookup. Results are cached for 24 hours per IP.

Link Health Checker (Settings > General)

Checks your affiliate links daily in small batches and adds a “Link” column
to the products list. Dead links are silently lost revenue, so broken ones
also raise an admin notice.

Rate limits (HTTP 429) and retailer outages (HTTP 5xx) are marked
“Unverified” rather than “Broken”, so you are only warned about links that
are genuinely dead (404/410).

Analytics (Affiliate Cards > Analytics)

• Clicks over time (7 / 30 / 90 days) with a daily bar chart
• Top products by clicks
• Top articles — which posts actually drive affiliate clicks
• Top countries

CUSTOMIZATION

Settings > General:
– Primary, button background, button text, and star colors
– Card corner radius
– Default button text and grid columns
– Link attributes: nofollow / sponsored / open in new tab
– Click tracking on/off
– Affiliate disclosure text (used by [dzwapc_disclosure])

Cards use flat borders on all four sides with no drop shadow. For deeper
styling, override .dzwapc-card, .dzwapc-btn, .dzwapc-table, .dzwapc-stars in your theme.

NOTES

• Product data is entered by you or imported through official APIs — nothing
  is scraped, which keeps you compliant with affiliate program terms.
• Add an affiliate disclosure to pages using this plugin. The
  [dzwapc_disclosure] shortcode exists for exactly this; the FTC and most
  affiliate networks require it.
• Amazon’s operating agreement requires that displayed prices are kept
  current. Re-import or update prices periodically.

Developed by Daily Zero Waste — https://dailyzerowaste.com