Update: This post was originally posted on September 29, 2006 and is transferred from http://Blog.AMZN-Associates.com, my earlier blog which I will be transferring to Amazon.com per their request.
Amazon Associates team released aStore into Beta mid-August, just about a month-and-a-half ago and tens of thousands of people have already tried building a store. They have done a superb job of taking the complexity of building a site and adding products to it using their traditional build links mechanism.
Before I jump into describing aStore, let me show you a couple of aStore implementations on the net:
Adam Kalsey Store
Adam incorporated various books, camera and photo, Cell Phone & Service, Computers, and Electronics categories in his store. Each category has a fairly large number of products, which made it a bit difficult for me to understand how he chose the products to feature in his store. This implementation uses a linked store approach because the store is linked to by Adam’s main site.
John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing
John built his store with inline frames (read IFRAME tutorial here), so the store appears as if it were a part of his own site. It is a much better looking site than Adam Kelsey’s store.
When I worked with my team to design the Amazon Associates aStore, we never really envisioned it to be used as a stand-alone store where sites would simply link to. There are a couple of reasons why linking to an aStore is not a good idea:
- Once a customer clicks on a link to an aStore, he is lost there. Other than making a purchase at the store, there is really no way to get back to the original site other than clicking on a non-intuitive Back button on the browser.
- aStore itself resides on the Amazon domain, namely http://aStore.Amazon.com/AssocID. This takes your readers away from your domain, so they may not easily know how they ended up at Amazon or what they should do next.
It is a much better experience for you to put your own aStore on your site as an IFRAME, in a similar way done by John Jantsch above. This gives you an opportunity to continue offering your visitors a consistent user interface of your site. You also have all the associated navigation which allows your readers to return to other parts of your site should then choose to not make a purchase.
In all of my searching of various posts on the web, I have found a significant level of excitement around aStore initiative. What Amazon has done for the first time is make it insanely easy for anyone to create their own store and put it on your site.
However, while many of you are raving about aStore, I am not convinced that many people are actually promoting your store and are using it as a revenue-generating tool. If you know of a good implementation of aStore that is generating revenue today, please drop me a comment by email or in this post and I will highlight your site in my blog.
For those of you who haven’t yet built the Amazon aStore, my colleague Dave Taylor (a very smart individual who I had the pleasure of visiting this week) has already done a good job of describing of how to build one in his post a few weeks ago titled What is Amazon aStore?
Gene Kavner
Email me your questions at:
I've got my store (http://astore.amazon.com/grommel-20) now for two months and realized about $60 ... but I've not promoted it much. Still looking how I could do that.
Posted by: Daldianus | January 18, 2007 at 05:04 AM