How geo-routing picks an Amazon store

Amazon runs a separate storefront per country, and an affiliate tag is only valid on the storefront it was issued for. A US tag earns nothing on amazon.co.uk. Geo-routing is how shownote sends each viewer to their own Amazon and applies the right tag.

What happens on a click

1. shownote reads the viewer's country from the incoming request.
2. If you have a regional tag for that country, the link is rewritten to that country's Amazon domain with that tag applied.
3. If you don't, but the viewer is in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, or Spain and you've turned on the simplified-OneLink setting below, the link is rewritten to that country's Amazon domain with your US tag applied instead.
4. Otherwise, the viewer goes to your stored Amazon destination, with your default store tag applied if you've set one.

Set regional tags

Regional tags live under your Amazon store's settings. Add one per Amazon Associates account you hold — each country you've been approved for is a separate account with its own tracking ID.

Amazon's free simplified OneLink upgrade (a one-time setup in Associates Central) lets your US tag also earn on Amazon Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, so you don't need a separate regional account for each. But shownote won't route a buyer there on your US tag until you turn on I've upgraded to simplified OneLink in Associates Central, a checkbox on your studio's settings page. Leave it off until you've actually completed the Amazon-side upgrade — routing an un-upgraded US tag to a foreign storefront earns nothing there. A regional tag still wins wherever you've set one; the US tag only fills in where you haven't.

Amazon's OneLink also localizes the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden, but those pay into separately-linked local accounts, not the US one — the upgrade doesn't help there. Set a regional tag directly for those countries if you want a tag to follow the redirect.

It fails safe, always

Geo-routing is all-or-nothing: either the link is rewritten to the viewer's Amazon with the matching regional tag, or it isn't rewritten at all. There's no half-routed state where the domain changes but the tag doesn't follow.

When it doesn't apply — no regional tag for that country, an unrecognized region, a lookup failure — the viewer goes to the destination you stored, exactly as if geo-routing were never configured. Your default store tag is applied if you've set one; see Adding your affiliate tags. What you lose is the regional optimization: the viewer buys from the storefront you linked rather than their local one. A buyer never sees an error page because of enrichment.

Why a click looked "wrong"

Country comes from the network request, not from the viewer's account or language. A viewer travelling, or on a VPN, is routed by where they appear to be. That's usually right and occasionally surprising.