On March 2nd, 2021, Amazon took another step in its pursuit of global domination and launched a new storefront in Northern Europe, and another new Amazon affiliate program!
Amazon.pl was launched to support shoppers in Poland. This makes the 20th independent Amazon storefront worldwide now and the eighth in Europe (Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de, Amazon.it, Amazon.es, Amazon.nl, Amazon.se being the other seven).
What is turning into an exciting trend was that Amazon, once again, rolled out their super popular affiliate program, known as “Associates” on the same day as the launch of the storefront and marketplace. This is now the 19th independent affiliate program and the sixth in a row where the affiliate program was launched in tandem with the storefront. (Technically it’s the 20th affiliate program but the Amazon affiliate program for Turkey is currently private so we aren’t counting it).
Get comfortable and join us to learn how to sign up and use the Amazon Poland affiliate program, how to identify an Amazon.pl affiliate link, what the Amazon.pl affiliate program commissions are, and how their payout compares to the gold standard, Amazon.com’s Associates Program.
Amazon Poland (Amazon.pl)
In early 2021, Amazon said it would open a Polish site. Rumors came out weeks before the launch that Amazon was again moving forward in launching another region-specific affiliate program with the launch of their storefront in Poland.
Poland is one of the last major European countries without a dedicated Amazon site with the entire Amazon.pl website being in Polish, prices are also given in Polish currency, and descriptions are in Polish.
Previously, Polish shoppers typically bought from Amazon.de. Before the launch, Amazon.pl redirected to the Amazon Germany storefront (Amazon.de).
“We are excited about the launch of Amazon.pl and the opportunity to offer Polish customers a choice of over 100 million goods, including tens of thousands of products from Polish companies,” says Alex Ootes, vice president of EU development for Amazon. The 100 million-plus products are across 30 categories and include many products from European companies including well-known Polish companies such as Zelmer, Gerlach, Trefl, Bambino, and Krosno.
Amazon seems quite dedicated to the country where it currently employs around 18,000 people in nine warehouses in Poland and through Amazon Web Services. Additionally, Amazon is planning to open its 10th warehouse in Swiebodzin later this year which will add another 1,000 plus jobs.
While Amazon seems to have learned from their from the launch of Amazon.se (Sweden) last year showing the Argentinian flag instead of the Swedish flag, their reliance on auto-translating listings, which lead to mistranslated product descriptions with both hilarious and scary mistakes in Sweden, seems to have played out to a lesser degree in Poland. News reports that many product descriptions on the Amazon.pl site came out “as funny”.
Amazon Affiliate Program for Amazon.pl
The new Amazon affiliate program for Poland also goes by the name “Amazon Associates” (where the program in Germany is called “PartnerNet”) and, as expected, is nearly identical to the other 18 international Amazon affiliate programs. There are some minor nuances that we’ve outlined below.
Amazon.pl Affiliate Program Sign Up
The signup and login for the Amazon.pl affiliate program can be found at https://affiliate-program.amazon.pl/ or by clicking on the Poland country flag/name from any of the other Amazon Associates Central dashboards.
A quick side note that the Amazon Poland Associates Central dashboard (and signup process) is all in Polish so using Chrome, with the built-in translation service is a game-changer for our language-challenged people that have a hard enough time with English!
Most important, the signup for the Amazon Poland affiliate program appears to be open to creators, publishers, and affiliates worldwide (similar to most of the other European programs but unlike the Amazon Netherlands affiliate program for example) though there are minor limitations on what countries they can payout affiliate commissions to (more on that later).
The signup process takes the same four-step process the other Amazon affiliate programs follow, which includes providing Account Information, sharing the sites and social media channels you plan to share Amazon affiliate links from, providing some information about your profile (that includes questions about site/channel, size, focus topics, traffic generation methods, etc.) and finally presenting you with an affiliate tracking ID specific for you and the Amazon.pl affiliate program.
Just like the other Amazon affiliate programs worldwide, Amazon reviews your account after you’ve generated three “qualified” sales and your account will be auto expired if you aren’t able to do this within 180 days. On this note, we do not recommend signing up for the Amazon Poland affiliate program if you aren’t getting at least 100 clicks per month from Poland, as your time would likely be best spent elsewhere.
The signup process shouldn’t take you more than 20 minutes, and if this isn’t your first time you should be able to complete it in about 10 minutes max.
Amazon.pl Affiliate Program Commission Payment Methods
Amazon.pl affiliate payouts are limited to direct deposit (where some of the older programs also offer gift cards or paper checks) and allow for electronic payments to nearly 50 different countries including the US (but not Canada or Australia, which is the same as the recently launched Amazon Sweden Associates Program). If your bank account resides in one of the countries that aren’t covered by the options provided by Amazon then you’ll find that Payoneer is awesome for solving the problem of actually getting your commissions into your bank account. (Our love for Payoneer, and how to use Payoneer, is elaborated on here.)
Amazon.pl Affiliate Program Commission rates
The Amazon.pl affiliate program commission rates follow the “Fixed Fee for Specific Product Categories” format that Amazon.com adopted in March of 2017, and is not currently using the Qualified / Non-Qualified purchase format that many of the other European Amazon Associates programs are now using.
The published commission rates for the launch of the Amazon Poland affiliate program (March 2nd, 2021) are as follows:
While the press releases about the launch of the Amazon Poland store mention 30 categories, the Associates Operating Agreement lists 39 different product categories paying out between 10 and 1%. Broken down and compared to the current Amazon.com / US affiliate commission rates we find that besides Gift Cards and Video Game Consoles, the Amazon Poland affiliate program pays a higher commission rate for all categories!
Category | Amazon.pl | Amazon.com | Difference |
Food and Drinks | 8.00% | 1.00% | 7.00% |
Grocery | 8.00% | 1.00% | 7.00% |
Amazon Devices (Kindle, Echo, Fire Accessories) | 10.00% | 4.00% | 6.00% |
Amazon Fashion Women | 10.00% | 4.00% | 6.00% |
Clothing | 10.00% | 4.00% | 6.00% |
Jewelery | 10.00% | 4.00% | 6.00% |
Luggage | 10.00% | 4.00% | 6.00% |
Men & Kids Private Label | 10.00% | 4.00% | 6.00% |
Shoes | 10.00% | 4.00% | 6.00% |
Watches | 10.00% | 4.00% | 6.00% |
Digital Video Games | 8.00% | 2.00% | 6.00% |
DVD & Blu-Ray | 8.00% | 2.50% | 5.50% |
Baby | 8.00% | 3.00% | 5.00% |
Beauty | 8.00% | 3.00% | 5.00% |
Business Industrial & Scientific Products | 8.00% | 3.00% | 5.00% |
Home | 8.00% | 3.00% | 5.00% |
Home Improvement | 8.00% | 3.00% | 5.00% |
Lawn and Garden | 8.00% | 3.00% | 5.00% |
Musical Instruments | 8.00% | 3.00% | 5.00% |
Pet Products | 8.00% | 3.00% | 5.00% |
Sports & Outdoor | 8.00% | 3.00% | 5.00% |
Toys | 8.00% | 3.00% | 5.00% |
Kindle eBooks | 8.00% | 4.00% | 4.00% |
Software | 8.00% | 4.00% | 4.00% |
Stationery & Office Supplies | 8.00% | 4.00% | 4.00% |
Video Games | 5.00% | 1.00% | 4.00% |
Books | 8.00% | 4.50% | 3.50% |
Kitchen | 8.00% | 4.50% | 3.50% |
Digital Software | 5.00% | 2.00% | 3.00% |
Home Entertainment | 5.00% | 2.00% | 3.00% |
Handmade | 8.00% | 5.00% | 3.00% |
Music | 8.00% | 5.00% | 3.00% |
Computer | 5.00% | 2.50% | 2.50% |
All other Product Categories | 5.00% | 4.00% | 1.00% |
Camera | 5.00% | 4.00% | 1.00% |
Electronics | 5.00% | 4.00% | 1.00% |
Smartphones and Mobile Phones | 5.00% | 4.00% | 1.00% |
Gift Cards | 0.00% | 0.00% | 0.00% |
Video Game Consoles | 1.00% | 1.00% | 0.00% |
How To Identify an Amazon.pl Affiliate Link
Affiliate links for Amazon Poland follow the same format as Amazon affiliate programs across Europe and the Middle East with the key of “tag=” followed by a string of characters that end with “-21”. For example geniuslink0d-21.
https://www.amazon.pl/gp/product/0804139024/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?tag=geniuslink0d-21
Amazon Affiliate Product Advertising API for Poland
Unlike the recent rollouts of the Amazon Netherlands, Amazon Singapore and Amazon United Arab Emirates affiliate programs, the support for the Product Advertising API (“PA API”) for Poland wasn’t delayed. The v5 PA API Scratchpad shows support for the Amazon Poland endpoint.
Amazon OneLink + Amazon Poland
Just like with all of the newer Associate’s programs (India, Mexico, Australia, Brazil, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden) Amazon’s affiliate link localization tool, OneLink, does not support Amazon.pl. Therefore, if you are using OneLink, then the Amazon.pl links posted to your site won’t be localized for any international traffic, and when Amazon.com (or elsewhere) links are clicked from Poland, they won’t redirect to Amazon.pl.
Geniuslink + Amazon Poland
Support for a new Amazon storefront comes in two pieces with Geniuslink. The first being “auto-affiliation”, the process of taking a raw link and converting it into an affiliate link.
This means you only need to add your affiliate tracking ID into the Geniuslink dashboard once and all of your links running through our service will be affiliated. Auto-affiliation support for the Amazon.pl Associates affiliate programs is live on Geniuslink.
The second stage of support on Geniuslink is our industry-leading link translation. Our patented process allows us to find the same product that you are linking to from any other Amazon storefront and redirect to a link to that product in Amazon Poland (assuming it exists). This is the magic that allows a single geni.us link to work for a global audience and for you to monetize clicks from as many of the countries you’ve signed up for Amazon’s affiliate program for.
Conclusion
Once again, Amazon’s proven that expanding its international footprint is important and that offering regionally focused storefronts is the way to do it. It’s exciting to see yet again Amazon leveraging their affiliate program in their “go to market” gameplan. We enjoy watching them grow because it generates opportunities for content creators around the world.
What country do you think Amazon will launch a new storefront and affiliate program in next? How many storefronts worldwide do you think they will have in the next year?
Use the comments below for any questions you have or any observations we may have missed.
Author
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Austin Tuwiner is a growth marketer and main contributor to the Geniuslink blog. When he's not nerding about affiliate marketing, you'll find him scuba diving South Floridas reefs.