FAQ & troubleshooting

Yes. Pukulink is free and distributed under GPLv2 or later. It is not a limited edition of a paid plugin — everything described on this site is included.

Not today. Pukulink currently talks to Amazon.co.jp, Rakuten Ichiba and Yahoo! Shopping (Japan), through Amazon Associates JP, Rakuten Affiliate, ValueCommerce and Moshimo Affiliate. Other Amazon regions, eBay, Walmart and AliExpress are not supported yet.

You do not have to write in Japanese, and your readers do not have to be in Japan — but for now the money has to come from Japanese affiliate programmes for the plugin to be useful.

It is meant to go wider eventually. The plugin is built as a shared core plus one adapter per marketplace, and it is fully internationalised, so adding a marketplace is a contained job rather than a rewrite. The Amazon Creators API supports switching marketplace, so other Amazon regions are the likely first step; eBay and similar would be new adapters after that.

There is no timeline, and nothing here should be read as a commitment — a solid Japanese release comes first. If a particular marketplace would make you a user, mention it on the blog; requests are what set the order.

Search for Pukulink under Plugins > Add New in the WordPress admin. It is distributed through the WordPress.org plugin directory, so updates are announced in your admin as usual. If you prefer a ZIP, use the download page.

Pukulink follows your WordPress site language (Settings > General > Site Language). English is the source language, and a Japanese translation is distributed through translate.wordpress.org.

The site language also affects the front end: card wording such as “Amazon price:”, “Read reviews” and the “prices and availability are as of…” note is translated alongside the admin screens. Button labels are separate — you can rewrite those freely under Settings > Pukulink > Display & Design.

Yes. Add the block from the inserter's “+”, or type /pukulink (searching for “product link” also finds it). The Classic Editor is a stated strength, but the Block Editor is not an afterthought.

No. Rakuten alone, or Yahoo! alone, works. Buttons for marketplaces you did not configure are simply not shown. To try one first, Yahoo! Shopping is the easiest — its Client ID is issued immediately with no review.

A missing affiliate ID is the most common cause. For Rakuten Ichiba and Yahoo! Shopping, the API credentials alone are enough to search products and render cards, so buttons show up even when the affiliate ID (Rakuten Affiliate ID, or ValueCommerce sid / pid) is blank. In that state the button links to the plain store URL and no commission is attributed.

Since v2.6.5 the settings screen warns about this. Check that every enabled marketplace has its affiliate ID under Settings > Pukulink > API settings.

Pukulink does not reinterpret other plugins' shortcodes. If you switch, search and insert the products again. That is a deliberate decision to avoid mismatched product codes.

Yes. On a phone the search modal goes full-screen, and you can search and insert from there.

The shortcodes show up as plain text. If you want them to keep rendering as something, add this to your theme's functions.php and they degrade to minimal text links.

// Keep [pukulink] rendering as a minimal link after Pukulink is deactivated
add_shortcode( 'pukulink', function ( $atts ) {
	$a   = shortcode_atts( array( 't' => '', 'rurl' => '', 'yurl' => '', 'asin' => '' ), $atts, 'pukulink' );
	$url = $a['rurl'] ? $a['rurl'] : ( $a['yurl'] ? $a['yurl'] : ( $a['asin'] ? 'https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/' . rawurlencode( $a['asin'] ) : '' ) );
	if ( '' === $url || '' === $a['t'] ) {
		return esc_html( $a['t'] );
	}
	return '<a href="' . esc_url( $url ) . '" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">' . esc_html( $a['t'] ) . '</a>';
} );
add_shortcode( 'pukulink_draft', '__return_empty_string' );

A shortcode, and nothing else. Its contents are the product name, product codes (ASIN / Rakuten itemCode / JAN code), the bare product URLs, the price and the fetch date. No plugin-specific HTML and no affiliate IDs are written into the post.

[pukulink shop="rakuten" t="Product name" kw="search keyword" img="https://..." pr="1980"
  rate="4.5" rv="12" rcode="shop:10000001" rurl="https://item.rakuten.co.jp/..."
  tp="standard" amz="1" rk="1" yh="1" pr_show="0" d="2026-07-07"]

Some attributes appear only when you set a per-card override.

• pr_show — price display (1 = show, 0 = hide; absent means follow the site setting)
• imgs — extra gallery image URLs (|-separated, up to 4)
• gallery_show — gallery display (1 = always show, 0 = always hide; absent means follow the site setting)

Affiliate URLs are assembled at display time, so changing an ID or a design updates every post at once.

Yes — the export on the Report tab writes settings, the product registry, insertion history, click totals and price history to JSON. Secrets such as Client Secrets are excluded.

WP-Cron runs hourly and gradually refreshes products displayed within the last 30 days whose cache period (24 hours by default) has expired. To stay inside each API's rate limit — roughly one request per second — it never fetches everything at once.

Yes, two ways.

• Site-wide: under Display & Design > Price display, switch off “show prices”, “show the fetch date” and “show the note” independently. The change applies to every saved post at once — nothing needs re-inserting.
• Per card: the insert preview's Price display control offers “follow the site setting / show / hide”, so you can override just the cards that need it.

Hiding a price does not affect fetching, automatic updates or structured data. Switch it back to “show” and the current price appears.

If you display Amazon prices, leaving the fetch date on is the safer reading of the Associates Programme Operating Agreement.

Check in this order.

1. Is the site quiet? WP-Cron only fires when someone loads a page. Schedule wp-cron.php with your server's cron (example).
2. Is it a Yahoo! item? Yahoo! Shopping only auto-updates items with a JAN code. Without one, the price captured at insertion stays.
3. Has the product been displayed recently? Only products shown in the last 30 days are updated (registration is dropped after 90 days without a view).
4. Does the connection test pass? Expired API credentials stop updates.

Yes — Product health on the Report tab lists them, with a one-click search for the posts using each one.

Only “which post, which marketplace's button, and when”. Nothing that identifies a person is stored. If you enable Google Analytics (gtag) events, that click is also sent to GA. See the privacy page.

No. Credentials such as Client Secrets are never sent to a server operated by the plugin developer, or anywhere other than the relevant service. Every destination is disclosed on the privacy page.