Amazon Releases an Early Update to aStore

Early this morning, October 12, 2006, Amazon announced a number of improvements to aStore, a product that allows a quick and easy way for all of you who are Amazon affiliates to build your own store featuring just the products that match the content of your site. These changes provide additional flexibility to you in the way you build your aStore.



On September 27, 2006, the Amazon Associates team sent out an email to all of us who are beta testers of the Amazon aStore product. In this email Amazon announced a number of upcoming changes to the Amazon aStore, scheduled for a late November 2006 release, namely:



With the changes announced today, Amazon released a couple of upcoming improvements ahead of their own schedule. The new features that Amazon has released this morning are:

• For sites that link to an aStore (rather than embed it as part of site), Amazon now allows you to have a back-link to your main affiliate site from the aStore. This is a significant improvement for two reasons: 1) Your visitors clicking off to your store now have a convenient way to get back to your site, and 2) It helps your site's page rank by having a link from aStore which is stored on the aStore.Amazon.com domain.
  
  
  
  Bug? It took me quite a while to figure out why this feature wasn't working when I turned it on this morning. I discovered that for it to work, you must have at least one category page enabled and "Hide category navigation" turned off. I do not see why needing to have category browsing is a requirement for this to work and am hoping that Amazon fixes this in the next release.
  
  
• You may now remove the header of your site. This is a great ability if you are embedding your aStore using an <IFRAME> and already have a header on your pages. If you wish to have the header, it is nice that Amazon is giving you the ability to upload your own graphic or specify size of text should you want to have text-only header.
  
  
  
  
• You may now remove category navigation from your aStore. Great feature but has some weaknesses that I hope Amazon improves upon:
  
  1. Link back to your site only works if you have at least one category enabled (see above).
  2. If you add categories but forget that "Hide Category Navigation" checkbox at the bottom is checked, your categories will not show up. Would be nice for the checkbox to automatically turn off when you add categories/sub-categories.
  3. When you change page title to each of the categories (great feature!) you need to remember to hit "Save" each time before you move on to the next category or whatever you typed in for your category title/description will be lost. I believe "Save" should be automatic as it is with other portions of the aStore.
  4. You can only add a sub-category page once you have a category page. If you wish to only display Electronics GPS devices, you need to display all of Electronics and then a separate page for GPS devices. I would have loved to be able to show GPS devices without needing to show the entire Electronics category.
  5. Sub-categories are not visible until your user clicks on the category link. Thus, the user may not even know that you have a GPS sub-category unless he clicks on the Electronics category first.
  
  
• The custom product description length has been extended, allowing you to say more about the products you recommend to your customers.
  
  
• Product detail pages now display a "crossed-out" list price followed by the Amazon.com price.
  
  
• The page title in the browser now displays the name of the aStore combined with the category name or product name, making aStore more search-engine friendly.

Other than above, we are still waiting for an update to aStore that will enable:

• Multiple aStores per Associates account
• Specify products to feature on Category and Sub-Category pages
• Feature up to 54 products on the front page of your store rather than the current limit of nine

I think it is great that the Amazon team is taking steps to release excellent functionality in steps rather than us having to wait until all of them are done. aStore is still in beta but Amazon is making excellent steps towards enabling it to become the easiest means to build your own personal store on your web site. I will be adding my aStore to AffiliateBrand.com in the next day or two.

Gene Kavner