I've Been Building In Stealth Mode

Hey, friends! For the past couple of months, I’ve been secretly cooking up a project that I’m finally ready to tell you about. Let’s get into it!

Earlier this week, I launched a new project called AffiliCart Pro. It’s a WordPress plugin that turns Amazon affiliate links into feature-rich shopping experiences.

Normal affiliate links drive traffic away from your site, where users then have to search for their correct size before they (maybe) complete a transaction, which leaves them increasingly unlikely to return to your site to finish your article, view your ads, and buy other affiliate products.

Imagine you’re a fashion blogger, and you’ve pieced together the perfect outfit. Your readers love it and want it for themselves. They click the first link to the top you’ve recommended. Now they’re on Amazon shopping, and not on your website also buying the bottoms, shoes, and accessories you’ve also recommended.

Commissions gone.

AffiliCart allows users to add multiple affiliate products to a persistent shopping cart in their specific size, and check out on Amazon in a single click.

See the video below for an example:

This behavior reduces visitor bounce rate and increases commissions, as users make it to Amazon only once they’re ready to finalize the transaction, which isn’t the case with most affiliate links today.

At least that’s the idea.

I am currently seeking beta testers, so if you have a WordPress website AND you are a part of the Amazon Associates affiliate program (or you know someone who is), I’d love to connect and give you free lifetime access. Just hit me up.

A group of students in my entrepreneurship class came up with an idea for a business called Pursue It, which consists of a 12-question personality assessment that reveals new hobbies you might like, along with the accompanying kit needed to pursue them. Their primary revenue stream comes from commissions earned on kit sales.

I helped them build shopping cart behavior into the affiliate links on their website and then quickly realized this solution could be valuable to more than just them.

I spent the next couple of weeks polishing the tool into two WordPress plugins:

1. A free light version that adds shopping cart behavior for single products

2. A licensed pro version that introduces product variant support (sizes, for example) and several other premium features.

I spent weeks trying to get approved for listing in WordPress’s official plugin directory, but they refused, so I’ve made it available for free on my marketing page at affilicartpro.com.

In addition to building the plugin, I also had to build the website to market the plugin. For that, I vibe-coded it using GitHub Copilot. I’m really happy with the way it turned out, and while just about anyone can build a website with agentic coding these days, I continue to believe that taste plays an important role in the product's outcome and would like to take some credit for how it turned out.

I particularly think the hero section looks pretty slick:

I’m also a big fan of the ScrollSpy feature on the Documentation page. If you’re unfamiliar, ScrollSpy is when a menu items gets bold when you scroll to its corresponding section in the document. Great UX.

Even though I didn’t write each line of code, the color scheme, typographic choices, and art direction were heavily influenced by me.

Something I am experimenting with is hosting a blog written in pure HTML and CSS—no back end processing necessary. To hand code something like this would be unbearable, but with agentic coding, it’s a breeze and the end user gets to benefit from a load time that is nearly impossible to deliver any faster.

You can read the blog here.

The way my plugin handles product entry is with Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (or ASINs). These are featured on every Amazon product page, but they’re usually pretty buried and hard to find, so I built a Chrome Extension to copy them in a single click.

When you’re on an Amazon product page, just click the Chrome Extension icon. It’ll display the ASIN along with a “Copy to Clipboard” button. Just click it and move on to your next product!

See the gallery below for a full demo:

Building a Chrome extension was a completely new experience for me, but it was fun and surprisingly painless. Aside from a one-time $5 developer fee, all I had to do was submit it for review, and it was approved.

If you use my plugin, I highly recommend using the Chrome extension too.

This project felt like a glimpse into the future. A year or two ago, I never could have built it, but with advances in artificial intelligence, I was. It increasingly seems to me that the only limiting factor these days in seeing an idea come to fruition is a willingness to try.

Most things are figureoutable. As such, it seems like getting good at deciding what to figure out is a meta-skill worth investing in.

This project started as a way to support my students, but it evolved into something much more. I’m excited for people to start using it and seeing it in the wild. If you or someone you know might be interested in testing it out, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Thank you, and catch you next time.

-Mike