AzonTables Review | The BEST Amazon Associates Tables Plugin

What is Azon Tables?

Azon Tables is a great plugin if you need to pull data via the Amazon API and display it in an easy to understand table format. The plugin offers styling options for the overall table, headers and rows. There are a list of data fields that can be pulled from the Amazon API and sorted into rows. As the data is directly sourced from the API, the plugin enables the site to abide by Amazon’s strict terms of service.

Azon Tables allows you to build 100% responsive Amazon API driven tables.

Amazon API integration
Auto updating prices
Complies with Amazon TOS
Create unlimited comparison tables
Change the styles of the tables
Great for authority sites
Fully responsive on all screen sizes
Use shortcodes to insert tables into posts or pages

A more comprehensive review will follow shortly, I have just started using the plugin so I will need time to asses its value to the average users site.

As of April 2019 the developer of AzonTables has stopped updates and ceased selling AzonTables. This is sad as the plugin had real potential.

My recommended alternative is AAWP – you can read the review of AAWP here.

Who is Azon Tables for?

Azon Tables is aimed at affiliate marketing bloggers with WordPress blogs. Amazon TOS are very strict in regards to images and pricing being accurately obtained from Amazon. If you try to take images and prices from the site manually, Amazon may suspend your affiliate account.

Azon Tables is a simple and safe way to import images, prices and product information directly from the Amazon API directly into your WordPress blog.

Azon Tables in action

In this demonstration video, I go through the features, basic operation and table setup. I picked a product, made a WordPress post, created a table with a variety of Azon Tables options and used the shortcode to add the table to my post.

What are the benefits and features of Azon Tables?

Azon Tables has several key features that enable you to keep within the Amazon associates terms of service and import accurate Amazon images, descriptions, titles and prices.

Accurate images, prices and descriptions from Amazon API
Unlimited table creation
Table styling
Table sorting
Responsive design
Table pagination
Add tables to post or pages with shortcodes
Smart tables – table state stored for when visitor next visits
No coding required
Works with all Amazon Associates enabled countries
Self hosted tables
Add affiliate link to any table cell

How much does Azon Tables cost?

In the world of Amazon Affiliate plugins, Azon Tables is actually priced quite well. The current cost is $49 for an unlimited licence on any number of sites. This is a one off payment and not a yearly subscription. A reasonable investment for a very good plugin.

Azon Tables setup and options

AzonTables is quite easy to setup and get going in just a few minutes. You need your Amazon API keys and Amazon affiliate tags for each country you have an Amazon associates account with.

There are 3 main tabs for Azon Tables settings configuration:

Amazon API
Global Table Settings
Global Table Styles

Amazon API

The aforementioned Amazon API and tags are very important as you need the correct details to import data from the Amazon API. Azon Tables covers all Amazon Associates available countries, you must be registered in each programme individually if you want to receive affiliate income from that country. Enter each country affiliate tag into the corresponding box.

Global Table Settings

These settings relate to the global table settings for Azon Tables. The fields are:

Hide table header
Enable table sorting
Enable table filtering
Enable table pagination
Number of rows per page
Pagination position
Table Pagination – Pages displayed limit
Enable table memory
Table custom responsive settings

There are a range of options here to setup the tables globally. The main settings I looked at were:

Hide table header

Quite simply this displays or hides the table header. I think the table looks better with the header, especially if you have a few columns of data. If you are only displaying the image and price then maybe it will look better with the header fields hidden. In my experience, I used the image, title, description and price fields.

Enable Table Sorting

This is a very useful feature if you have more than a few products and are using pagination for example, you could allow sorting by price and let the reader manipulate the table to suit their preference. Sorting will be looked at later on but just to highlight the feature, any field can be sorted, this can be disabled during the table creation settings.

Enable Table Filtering

Enabling table filtering places a search box above the table allowing the user to filter by search terms. Very useful if you have a lot of products but I think it gets in the way. I have been using small tables with 3-5 products and there is no filtering required for this.

Enable Table Pagination

Table pagination helps to keep the table in order by splitting large tables into pages, table pagination makes the table look compact and neat. The number of rows per page can be configured here and the position of the pagination labels.

Enable Table Memory

Table memory is useful if you have a large table with lots of data. If a user makes changes to the table sort order or hides fields, these changes are saved in the browser and the user is presented with the same table when they return.

Table Custom Responsive Settings

This section covers a few options:

Base responsive breakpoints off the width of the container
Custom breakpoints
Expand the first row by default
Expand all rows by default
Hide the toggle button

The default settings for the responsive breakpoints is based of the width of the window, if you are using a container, check this option.

If rows contain a lot of text, they will not be fully expanded, selecting expand the first row or expand all rows will ensure that the rows will be expanded to display all of the data. I have not used this as I did not always display the description. There is also a row toggle button to allow the user to hide rows.

Global Table Styles

These settings relate to the global table style settings for Azon Tables. The fields are:

Enable table wrapper border
Table header styles
Table row styles
Table footer styles

The styling options will affect the styles for all of the Azon Tables created. The functions are pretty self-explanatory.

I like the table to stand out as a table with a border, the border width, style and colour can be easily adjusted to suit your blog style. There are options to enable header styling, row styling and footer styling. I only tried row styling as the other two look fine as they are.

The row styling, again, looks better when there is a large list of fields, this enables odd and even rows to be shaded in different colours. I will mention that I tried this and experience an issue with the shades not alternating. The developer is working on a fix for this. As I only use small data sets, I just left the styling off.

There are a lot of options to look at here but quite honestly, I ignore most and just tinkered with a few and was up and running in literally minutes, don’t get bogged down in the minute details, the main thing is to get the products and affiliate links into a nice simple table.

Adding Azon Tables and Products

After the setup process, now comes the fun part – setting up the tables and adding products. In my example table and post, I created a product post page listing bluetooth mice.

The Azon Tables setup is pretty straightforward, the layout and process is similar to the standard WordPress post page. Give the table a descriptive title for your own reference, create your columns and setup the columns, add products via ASIN or general search and publish/save table. The table is easy to insert via the given shortcode on the Azon Tables tab. Insert the shortcode and the table is inserted.

Create Data Columns

The columns creation process is where the magic happens. Here you can choose from a list of column field types and other column settings.

The columns types are:

Product title
ASIN
Brand
Model
UPC
Features
Warranty
Price
Lowest new price
Lowest used price
Small/Meidum/Large image
Affiliate link image
Affiliate link button
Affiliate link text

Most of the column types are obvious, you can change the look and feel of the table by trying a few different layouts. Usually, the image comes first and then the title, maybe description and finally the price. Some, mostly larger, affiliate sites like to display a call to action buy now or available on Amazon button. This could be the psychology of gaining the readers trust as they recognise the Amazon brand and maybe more than happy to click on the link.

Add Products

Adding products is very easy as you can use either the ASIN product code if you know exactly the product you want to add or you can perform a general text search and look through the results and add products. Batch adding products is not available yet but is coming soon, at the moment, products are inserted individually.

When the product is found, you can adjust the columns created if the data presented does not fit into what you are looking to display in the table. The date field is in green and the results are output exactly as they would appear in the field.

Inserting the Completed Table

Once you have saved/published the table, head over the the Azon Tables tab and you can view a list of saved tables and their shortcode. Inserting the table is as easy as copying the shortcode and pasting into a post or page.

The final table looks clean and well presented with plenty of clear date and images with clear (and accurate!) pricing. This table is enough for me and my blogs but if you recall, there were some additional affiliate options for the columns. If you are wondering how they look, check out the image below.

This looks a bit haphazard but that is because I wanted to illustrate all of the affiliate options at once. Remember, these are additional affiliate buttons and options, there is already the option to add your affiliate link automatically to any field including the image and price as I have done.

The first image shows how some of the buttons, plain buttons and simple text look on the table. The second image shows all of the 5 button styles available. Not ideal if you only have a country-specific Amazon Associates account and not a .com.

My Experience and Conclusion

Overall, I would say that Azon Tables is a fabulous addition to any WordPress blog with Amazon Affiliate content. The table is easy to setup, easy to populate and has a nice clean, simplistic look and feel. I have only been using the plugin for a short while but I really believe that it will be a valuable addition to my blogs where I highlight products.

The plugin is in its’ infancy so a few bugs need to be ironed out. I initially had the version 1.0.0C release, this has since been upgraded to 1.0.2 and a few bugs have cleared. As mentioned, there are a few issues with sorting the data and row styling, I am not a fan of the former but I want to use the latter so a resolution to this would be nice.

There are a plethora of Amazon affiliate plugins but this is one of the simpler ones if you just want to add a few highlighted products to a blog post.

I was invited to try the plugin for free, which I did do initially. I was so impressed with it, I purchased it for use on my blogs as I believe that it has great potential in the Amazon Affiliates plugins market. If the bugs can be attended to and a few features such as the batch product import added, this will be a great plugin.

For a one off cost, this is a great plugin for importing Amazon data, better than paying a yearly subscription.