Doozly
SiteStripe is the black bar Amazon puts across the top of its own site when you are signed in as an Associate. It still works — but only one of its three link buttons survived. Image and Text+Image were removed on 1 December 2023, and the links you had already published stopped loading on 31 December. No warning on the page, no placeholder, just gaps where your product pictures used to be.
This page covers what is left, how to find the damage on your own site, and the part that is rarely joined up: the API Amazon told everybody to migrate to has since been retired as well.
What SiteStripe still does
Text still produces a plain tagged link, and it works exactly as it always did. If all you publish is inline text links, nothing about your workflow changed and nothing on your site broke.
Image and Text+Image are gone. Those were the two that pulled a product photograph from Amazon and wrapped it in your affiliate link. They are not hidden, deprecated or behind a setting — the buttons were removed from the toolbar.
The important part is the second date. Removing the buttons on 1 December only stopped you making new ones. On 31 December 2023 the images already embedded in old posts stopped being served, which is a different and much larger problem: it broke pages nobody had touched in years.
Why nobody noticed for weeks
A broken product image is unusually quiet. The page still loads, the layout mostly holds, and the reader sees an empty box or a small broken-image glyph. Nothing errors. Nothing is logged. Analytics show no change, because the page was served fine.
What does change is conversion, and it changes on exactly the pages that were earning: the old, ranking, image-heavy round-ups. A review with five missing product photographs does not look broken to a search engine. It looks unconvincing to a human, who leaves.
If you have not checked, check now. This happened well over two years ago and the gaps do not repair themselves. Sites that ran on SiteStripe images in 2023 are still serving those blanks today, because nothing ever told the owner.
How to find every broken image on your site
SiteStripe images were not hosted on amazon.com. They were served from Amazon’s ad system on a host that no longer answers, and every one of them carries the same fingerprint in the URL:
amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/qA full one looked roughly like this, with the regional host varying by marketplace:
https://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B0CXXXXXXX&…Searching for the short fragment rather than the full URL is deliberate: it catches every regional host and every parameter variation in one pass. There are twenty-two of them, one per marketplace — the lookup has the full list.
- In WordPress, without a plugin. A search-and-replace plugin with a dry run mode will count the occurrences across
wp_postsbefore changing anything. Count first. The number is usually higher than people expect, because round-ups carry five or ten each. - With WP-CLI, if you have shell access,
wp db queryagainstwp_postsfor that fragment gives you the affected post IDs directly — the fastest way to see which pages are worth fixing first. - From outside, a crawler such as Screaming Frog will list broken images across the whole site, including any sitting in theme files or widgets rather than in post content.
Then sort the affected pages by traffic and fix downwards. Most sites find that a handful of old round-ups account for the great majority of the loss, and the long tail can wait.
What Amazon told you to do instead, and then retired
Amazon’s guidance in December 2023 was straightforward: product images should come from its API rather than from a widget host. Fair enough — and thousands of publishers spent that winter migrating to the Product Advertising API, either directly or through a plugin.
That API is now gone too.
Amazon’s own documentation now opens with the statement that “The Amazon Product Advertising API 5.0 (PA-API 5) has been deprecated” and points to the Amazon Creators API instead. Reporting puts the deprecation at 30 April 2026 and the endpoint being switched off at 15 May 2026.
So the honest summary of the last three years is this: a free tool was withdrawn, an API was named as its replacement, and that API was itself replaced before many people had finished migrating to it. If you are looking at broken images today and wondering what to build against, that history is the most useful thing to know — whatever you choose should be something somebody else keeps current for you.
The Creators API, and the bar you have to clear
The replacement is a different piece of software, not a version bump. It authenticates with OAuth 2.0 against a Credential ID and Credential Secret that you generate in Associates Central under Tools → Creators API, and it answers on a single host, creatorsapi.amazon, instead of a host per marketplace the old one used. Anything written against the old signing scheme has to be rewritten, not reconfigured.
The part that matters more than the plumbing is who is allowed in. The old API asked for three referred sales, once. Access to the Creators API is reported to require ten qualified referral sales in the previous thirty days, checked continuously.
Read that as a small site owner and the circularity is obvious. Product images help you sell. Selling ten items a month is what gets you the images. Miss a quiet month — a holiday, a seasonal dip, an algorithm wobble — and the pictures can go away again while you are trying to recover.
This is not a reason to despair, but it is a reason to make sure the rest of your setup does not depend on the API being available. A product box that shows nothing when the credential lapses is worse than one that shows what you typed.
If you are still working towards your first three sales, the sequence matters and it is covered in the piece on Amazon Associates requirements.
The workarounds that circulate, and what each one costs
Search this problem and you will meet four suggestions within a page or two. They are worth going through individually, because the reasons they fail are different and only one of them is obvious.
| The suggestion | Why it appeals | What actually happens |
|---|---|---|
| Hotlink the image URL from the product page | Takes a minute, looks identical | Not one of the licensed routes, and it breaks the same silent way SiteStripe did the next time Amazon changes a host |
| Save the photograph and re-upload it | Never breaks again | The one fix most likely to cost the account — the licence covers use through Amazon’s own interfaces, not a copy on your server |
| Screenshot the product page | Feels like your own work | Still Amazon’s photograph, now with Amazon’s interface around it |
| A third-party product-data service | Somebody else handles it | Depends what it is. A licensed route is fine; a scraper is the second row with a middleman in it |
The pattern is worth naming, because it decides the whole question: every route that skips Amazon’s own interface is fragile in the same direction. It works today, it costs nothing today, and it fails without telling you — which is precisely how thousands of sites arrived at this article with two years of blank boxes behind them.
The exception is the one that involves no Amazon content at all: your own photograph of the thing on your own table. It is the slowest option on the list and the only one nobody can withdraw.
What to actually do now
Four routes, and three of them do not involve buying anything.
- Delete the broken images and keep the text links. Free, honest, and much better than leaving gaps. A review that reads well without pictures still converts; a review with five blank boxes does not. If you do nothing else, do this.
- Photograph the products yourself. Slow, and only realistic if you actually own them — but it is the one option Amazon cannot withdraw, and it is what the sites in the examples piece that survived every rule change have in common.
- Use press or manufacturer images where the licence allows it. Check the licence properly. “It was on their website” is not a licence, and Amazon’s product photography is not yours to reuse outside its own programmes.
- Use a plugin that talks to the Creators API for you. The point is not that it fetches an image; it is that when Amazon changes the interface again — and this article is evidence that it will — somebody else does the migration.
| Route | Costs | Effort | Survives the next change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delete the images, keep the text links | Nothing | An afternoon | Yes |
| Photograph the products yourself | Nothing, if you own them | Ongoing | Yes |
| Licensed press or manufacturer images | Nothing | Per product, and read each licence | Depends on the licence |
| A plugin on the Creators API | Varies; ours is free without a credential | Setup once | Yes, if somebody keeps it current |
On the last one, the fair disclosure: we make one. Doozly already speaks to the Creators API rather than the retired one, and that is in the free version — without a credential it builds tagged product boxes from what you type, with no API call at all — which for a site below the ten-sales bar is not a limitation but the whole point. There are other good plugins in this category, and if you already run one that has migrated, you have nothing to fix.
Common questions
Does Amazon SiteStripe still work?
Yes, for text links. The Text button produces a tagged link exactly as before. The Image and Text+Image buttons were removed on 1 December 2023 and have not returned.
Why did my Amazon product images suddenly disappear?
If they were made with SiteStripe Image or Text+Image, they stopped being served on 31 December 2023. The host they loaded from no longer answers, so the picture is simply absent. Nothing on your site is broken and no plugin caused it.
How do I find SiteStripe images on my site?
Search your post content for the fragment amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q. That catches every regional host and parameter variation. A search-and-replace plugin with a dry-run mode will count them before you change anything.
Can I hotlink Amazon’s product image URLs instead?
It works, and it is not one of the routes Amazon licenses — the permission covers Product Advertising Content obtained through its own interfaces. It also fails the same silent way SiteStripe did: the day Amazon changes a host or a URL format, the pictures vanish and nothing tells you.
Can I just download Amazon’s product images and host them myself?
No. Amazon’s product photography is licensed for use through its own programmes and interfaces, not for copying onto your server. Saving the images and re-uploading them is the one fix that looks easiest and is the one most likely to cost you the account.
What replaced the Product Advertising API?
The Amazon Creators API. It uses OAuth 2.0 with a Credential ID and Secret created in Associates Central under Tools, Creators API, and a single host rather than one per marketplace. Amazon’s documentation states that PA-API 5.0 has been deprecated.
Do I need ten sales a month to show product images?
To use the Creators API, yes — access is reported to require ten qualified referral sales in the previous thirty days, checked on an ongoing basis. Product boxes that do not draw live data from Amazon have no such requirement, which is why a setup that degrades gracefully matters more than it used to.
Are the amzn.to short links affected?
No. The change removed two image features from the toolbar. Link shortening and plain text links were not part of it.
The short version: SiteStripe still makes text links and always will, the images have been gone since the end of 2023, and the API you were pointed at instead has itself been replaced. Check your old round-ups today — the gaps have been there longer than you think, and nothing was ever going to tell you.
