Migrating from AmazonWS to another Amazon Affiliate plugin for Joomla

Many Joomla installations are using the Amazon Affiliate product plugin AmazonWS by Fiona Coulter and SpiralScript. Sadly, she stopped developing the plugin due to health reasons. With Amazon Product Advertising API (PA-API) version 5.0 just around the corner, many Joomla webmasters are left empty handed, when Amazon shuts down PA-API 4.0 on March 9th 2020. Many users will need an alternative for embedding Amazon products into their Joomla sites. Here are my alternatives.

On 22nd January 2020, Amazon stated in an email, that Product Advertising API 4.0 will shut down on March 9th 2020. From that day on, all plugins using PA API 4.0 won’t be able to connect to Amazon PA services and need to be migrated to PA API 5.0.
Instantly I searched if there was an update available to AmazonWS plugin. While searching for the update, I found the sad message, that the AmazonWS plugin wouldn’t be maintained from now on.

I’ve used Fiona Coulters plugin since three years from now in paid and free editions. I was very sad to hear, that she wouldn’t be able to maintain the plugins due to an illness in the future. Although I don’t know her personally, except for some support cases,, her faith touched me. Maybe it was tocuhing because of her closure-note on her webpage, maybe because she is a web developer just like me. Anyway, first of all I would like to thank her for the work she has put into all her plugins and into the Joomla project itself.

What are the alternatives to AmazonWS?

 At the moment I think, there is only one option that is also approved by the Joomla Extension Directory:

 

Nearly the same functionality with EB Display Amazon Products

I wrote some mails with the guys from extnbkrs to make them aware of the AmazonWS dilemma and asked them a few questions:

Question: Will “EB Display Amazon Products” plugin support PA API 5.0? 
Answer: Yes, it is fully compatible with PA API v 5.0.

Question: Dioes “EB Display Amazon Products” support using ASINS and ISBN codes in Joomla shortcodes?
Answer: Yes, it does.
Why? This makes migration from AmazonWS to EB’s solution more easy, as I could just update all my articles with new shortcodes via database script, without having to re-enter every ASIN or ISBN. I’ll post the database update script here when it’s ready.

The configuration page of EB Display Amazon Products.
The configuration page of EB Display Amazon Products.

Internationalization via geni.us link service

If you want to automatically forward the outgoing links to the right international marketplace for the respective website visitor, the geni.us service is highly recommended:

All outgoing Amazon links of a website can be automatically internationalized by geni.us. For this we can embed the official geni.us JS-Script.

The nice thing is that this script automatically adjusts all outbound links (text links, plugin links, etc.). So I don’t need to care about internationalization and topics like Geo-IP in these plugins myself.