Affiliate Product Boxes Beyond Amazon: A WordPress Guide
If you run an affiliate site on WordPress, you already know the power of a great product box. A clean image, a clear title, a price, a confident call-to-action button — it turns a passing reader into a click, and a click into a commission. It’s exactly why AAWP has become the go-to for showcasing Amazon products: pull them straight from the Product Advertising API and you get polished, conversion-ready boxes with live prices and bestseller lists, all on autopilot.
But here’s a question almost every affiliate eventually asks: what about everything that isn’t on Amazon?
Most affiliate marketers don’t promote a single program. You might recommend a hosting company, a software tool, an online course, a direct-to-consumer brand or a marketplace with its own affiliate scheme. None of those products live in the Amazon catalogue — so they can’t be displayed with an Amazon-focused tool. And that’s where a lot of otherwise-beautiful affiliate sites fall apart.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to present non-Amazon affiliate products in WordPress with the same professional product boxes you already use for Amazon — and keep your links cloaked and tracked while you’re at it.
The Problem With Promoting Non-Amazon Products 🤔
When a product isn’t in Amazon’s catalogue, marketers usually fall back on one of two clumsy options:
- A plain text link. Functional, but forgettable. There’s no image, no price, no visual cue that says “this is a recommendation worth clicking.” Conversion rates suffer.
- A hand-built box in a page builder. It can look good, but it’s slow, fiddly, and a nightmare to keep consistent. Update a price across twenty posts? Have fun.
The result is a site that looks immaculate on its Amazon recommendations and oddly amateur everywhere else. That inconsistency quietly erodes trust — and trust is what affiliate income is built on.
What you really want is a way to build a proper product box for any product, embed it anywhere, and manage it all from one place.
The Solution: Product Boxes for Every Program 📦
This is exactly the gap that Smart Displays — a feature in the ClickWhale link manager — was built to close. (ClickWhale is also our recommended link management plugin, so it slots neatly alongside AAWP on the same site.)
Smart Displays let you create fully customizable product boxes and embed them anywhere on your WordPress site — via shortcode or a dedicated Gutenberg block. Each box can include everything readers expect from a strong recommendation:
- Product title
- Product image
- Description
- Price
- Call-to-action button(s)
The crucial part for affiliates: the product title, the image and the call-to-action button can each point to your existing ClickWhale affiliate links — so wherever a reader clicks, the link is automatically cloaked and tracked. That matters, because plenty of people click a product image or its name rather than the button. You get the clean, trustworthy look of a product box for any program — and the link hygiene that serious affiliates rely on.
How to Create a Product Box for a Non-Amazon Product ⚡
Say you want to recommend your favourite WordPress hosting company. The whole workflow takes a couple of minutes:
- Open the Smart Displays tab in your ClickWhale dashboard.
- Create a new display and fill in the product details — title, image, description and price.
- Point the title, image and call-to-action button at one of your existing ClickWhale affiliate links for that program.
- Copy the generated shortcode, or drop the Gutenberg block straight into your post or page.
That’s it. The box appears wherever you place it — inside a review, a comparison article, a resource page, anywhere.
Want to see it before installing anything on your own site? You can build a Smart Display yourself in ClickWhale’s interactive live demo — a full backend you can click around in, no install needed.
Keep Every Box On-Brand (Automatically) 🎨
Styling each box by hand would defeat the purpose, so Smart Displays include global styling options in the settings tab. Set your defaults once — button colors, borders, corner radius and button text — and they apply to every display you create.
You can also define a default affiliate disclosure text at the global level, so the disclosure your readers (and regulators) expect shows up consistently on every box, without you having to remember it each time.
And because every display lives in a central dashboard, updating a price or swapping an image is a one-place job — no hunting through old posts.
Why This Pairs So Well With AAWP 🤝
This isn’t about replacing anything. AAWP and Smart Displays solve two different halves of the same job:
| AAWP | Smart Displays (ClickWhale) | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Amazon products | Every non-Amazon affiliate program |
| Data source | Live, automatic via the Amazon PA API | Details you enter once, fully under your control |
| Pricing | Updated automatically | Static (you set it) |
| Bestseller & comparison tables | ✅ | Single product boxes |
| Link cloaking & click tracking | — | ✅ Built in via ClickWhale |
Run them side by side and your whole site speaks with one voice. AAWP keeps your Amazon recommendations live and automatic; Smart Displays give your hosting, software and course recommendations the exact same polish, with cloaking and tracking on top. Your readers stop noticing where a product comes from — and you finally get consistent click data across your entire portfolio.
Getting Started 🚀
The best news: Smart Displays are included in ClickWhale’s free tier — no Pro subscription required. Version 2.7.0 is also fully compatible with WordPress 7.0 and ships with a handful of stability and admin-area improvements.
So if your affiliate income reaches beyond Amazon — and for most of us, it does — there’s no longer any reason for those products to look like an afterthought.
👉 Get ClickWhale, open the Smart Displays tab, and give your non-Amazon recommendations the product boxes they deserve. Or take it for a spin in the live demo first — no install needed.
Start now with AAWP!
AAWP is the #1 WordPress plugin for Amazon affiliates who are serious about earning more. Get started today!