Your AliExpress affiliate links are quietly dying

I run affiliate links to AliExpress on a couple of my own sites. At some point I clicked through one of my older posts, out of curiosity, and landed on a page telling me the product was no longer available. Not a 404. A perfectly healthy page, with a search box and some recommendations, politely informing me that the thing I’d been recommending for months didn’t exist anymore.

That link had clicks in my stats. Every one of those clicks was a person who wanted to buy something and couldn’t.

Why this happens so much on AliExpress

AliExpress isn’t Amazon. Listings die fast. Sellers disappear, get suspended, run out of stock and never restock, or delete a listing and relist the same product under a new ID because the old one collected bad reviews. If you’ve done AliExpress affiliate for a while, you know the feeling: the top pick from your spring roundup is gone by autumn.

Amazon associates deal with this too, but it’s milder there. On AliExpress it’s the default state of the world.

Why your broken-link checker doesn’t see it

Here’s the annoying part: a dead AliExpress product is not a broken link.

Your affiliate link still redirects fine. The page still loads. It returns HTTP 200. It even looks alive - AliExpress serves a “sorry, this item is unavailable” page with suggested alternatives, which is great for AliExpress and useless for your reader. Broken-link plugins check status codes, so every one of them will tell you these links are healthy.

The only thing that actually knows whether a product can still be bought is AliExpress itself, through its API.

How to check it by hand

If you have a handful of links: just click them. Once a month, open every affiliate link you have and look at what loads. Boring, but it works, and it costs nothing.

If you have more than a handful, you can register free API keys on the AliExpress Open Platform and script the check - the product endpoint returns stock and status for a given item ID. That’s a decent weekend project if you like weekend projects.

How I ended up building a tool for it

I didn’t like the monthly click-through, so I wrote the script. Then the script grew a database, the database grew a UI, the UI grew email alerts, and at some point I had to admit I’d built a product.

It’s called AffKeeper. It watches the AliExpress products behind your links - out of stock, low stock, removed - and emails you before your readers find out. There’s a WordPress plugin that also does short links on your own domain, and your first affiliate link is monitored for free, no API keys needed, so you can see how it works before deciding anything.

If that’s useful to you, good. If not, the click-through-everything method genuinely works - I did it that way for longer than I want to admit.

Either way: go open your oldest affiliate post right now and click every link in it. I’d bet at least one of them points at nothing.