Amazon Store ID vs Influencer ID: which one goes on your links

Amazon Store ID vs Influencer ID is the setup mistake we see more than any other. People have both, they look vaguely alike, and they paste the wrong one. The short version: the Store ID goes on your links. The Influencer ID doesn't.

The Store ID

Your Store ID is your Amazon Associates tracking ID. Same thing, two names. It looks like yourname-20, a short name followed by a dash and a number.

It's what tells Amazon who sent the shopper. When you see tag=yourname-20 inside an Amazon product link, that's the Store ID doing its job.

To find yours, sign in to Amazon Associates Central at affiliate-program.amazon.com, click your account name at the top right, and choose Manage Tracking IDs. You can have more than one. That turns out to be useful, and we'll come back to it.

The Influencer ID

Your Influencer ID starts with ONAMZ. It belongs to a different Amazon program, the storefront and Live side of things, and it's not what goes on the off-site affiliate links you put in a Facebook caption or a YouTube description.

A link built with an Influencer ID wouldn't earn a commission on the platforms EverySqueeze posts to. So EverySqueeze never suggests one, and if you try to save one it refuses and tells you which ID to use.

And the storefront link

There's a third thing that gets pasted into the tracking ID box, and it's your storefront address: amazon.com/shop/yourname. That's a page, not an ID. Same goes for an amzn.to short link. Neither one contains anything we can use as a tracking ID, and the box says so when you paste one.

A full product link is different. If it contains tag=yourname-20, you can paste the whole link and the box keeps only the part after tag=.

How to tell which one you've got

Look at the start and the end. Starts with "onamz"? Influencer ID. Wrong one. Ends in a short suffix like -20, and starts with anything else? That's almost certainly your Store ID.

If you're still not sure, don't guess from something you saved in a notes app two years ago. Go to affiliate-program.amazon.com and read it off the Manage Tracking IDs page.

Where it goes in EverySqueeze

Settings, then Amazon, under "Your Amazon tracking IDs". There's a Default box, which is required, and it covers every link we build unless a platform overrides it.

In the phone app it's under Settings (the cog), then Accounts and platforms, then Amazon tracking IDs. Same saved ID as the dashboard. Change it in one place and the other follows.

What if you never set one? Posts EverySqueeze makes for you go out without an Amazon link at all until an ID is saved. We'd rather send no link than an untagged one that earns you nothing and looks like it should.

Why you might want more than one

Below the Default box you can set a separate ID for YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Leave any of them blank and it falls back to the default.

Here's why you'd bother. Amazon's reports break earnings out by tracking ID. If everything shares one ID, you get one number and no idea which platform it came from. Give Facebook its own ID and YouTube its own, and your Amazon reports show you each one separately. You create the extra IDs on the same Manage Tracking IDs page.

We think this is worth the few minutes it takes. It's the cheapest way to find out whether reposting to a given platform is doing anything for you.

After you change an ID

Posts that are already scheduled pick up the new ID when they go out. You don't need to delete or reschedule them, because a scheduled post doesn't store a link. The Facebook caption link, the Pinterest link and the YouTube description link are all built at the moment the post is published, with whatever ID is saved then.

There's one exception. A YouTube post you scheduled from the YouTube description box keeps the finished description you saw, link included. Take that one off the Schedule and schedule it again. Settings tells you after a save if you have any of these.

Posts that are already live keep the link they went out with. Changing your ID today doesn't reach back and edit last month's captions.

One more Amazon chore

While you're in Associates Central, check the Websites and Mobile Apps list in your account settings. Amazon requires every site or app that carries your affiliate links to be listed there, and that includes each social profile you post tagged links on. Add your Facebook Page, your YouTube channel, whichever ones you really post to. Amazon has suspended Associates accounts over links that turned up on profiles that weren't on the list. It's a dull job. Do it anyway.

If you need a tagged link for something outside the normal posting flow, like a reply to a comment, Settings has a link builder right below the tracking IDs. Paste an ASIN or an Amazon product URL, pick the platform, and it hands back a link with the right ID on it.