WooCommerce is usually used to sell your own products, but it has a product type made for affiliates: External/Affiliate product. It lets you list a product in your shop while the purchase happens on another website. This guide covers how it works, how to set it up well and what to watch out for.
What is an External/Affiliate product?
A normal WooCommerce product has an “Add to cart” button. An external product replaces it with a button that opens a URL you choose — usually your affiliate link. The product still has everything else: title, images, description, price, categories, tags, reviews and its own page that can rank in Google.
Because the sale happens elsewhere, external products have no stock, no shipping and no checkout on your site.
How to create one by hand
- Go to Products → Add New.
- In the Product data box, choose External/Affiliate product.
- Fill in Product URL (your affiliate link) and Button text, for example “Buy on ThemeForest” or “View price”.
- Enter the Regular price (and Sale price if there is a discount).
- Add the product image, gallery, short description and full description.
- Choose categories and tags, then publish.
Best practices
1. Make the button honest and clear
Tell visitors where they are going: “Buy on CodeCanyon” is better than “Buy now”. People who know they will land on another site are less likely to bounce.
2. Use the right link attributes
Google asks site owners to mark affiliate links with rel="sponsored". WooCommerce does not add it by default, so use a plugin or a small snippet that does. Opening the link in a new tab is optional — test what works for your audience.
3. Hide what you do not use
Remove the Cart and Checkout pages from menus and hide the mini-cart in your theme. They confuse visitors when nothing can be added to the cart.
4. Keep prices accurate
This is the biggest weakness of external products: WooCommerce does not know when the real price changes. If your page shows $39 and the marketplace shows $59, visitors lose trust. Either update prices regularly or use a tool that does it for you.
5. Write your own content
Copying the merchant’s description gives you a page that hundreds of other sites already have. Add what only you can add: who the product is for, pros and limitations, how it compares with alternatives, screenshots of your own tests.
6. Disclose the affiliate relationship
Add a short notice near the button or at the top of the page, and a full disclosure page linked in the footer.
Common problems and fixes
- The button does not show. The Product URL field is empty, or the theme overrides the single-product template. Check the field first, then test with a default theme.
- Price shows in the wrong currency. WooCommerce shows prices in the store currency. If the merchant uses USD and your store uses EUR, you need to convert.
- “Out of stock” labels. External products do not manage stock; if you see this, a stock plugin or theme setting is interfering.
- Schema warnings in Search Console. Product pages need a price, availability and preferably ratings in their structured data. Most SEO plugins handle this for WooCommerce products.
Doing it at scale
Creating a few external products by hand is fine. For a full catalog from Envato Market, Romelius Affiliate Importer creates the external products for you — title, images, gallery, price, rating, categories and affiliate link — and keeps them up to date with Smart Sync. It also adds rel="sponsored nofollow" to the buttons, converts prices to your currency and marks removed items as unavailable instead of leaving broken pages.
See it in action in the live demo, or read How to Build an Envato Affiliate Store with WooCommerce.