Looking for an easy way to build a showcase of Amazon products for your web site? Amazon recently introduced aStore ™ – a product “store builder” interface for Amazon associates.
The aStore interface is flexible and simple to use. You begin by doing a search on your site’s subject and choosing some featured products from the search results. This is an easy “click-to-add, click-to-remove” process, and you can optionally add your own descriptions, page title and page text.
After building the featured product showcase, you can create category and sub-category pages based on Amazon product categories. There are not a lot of configuration options here, but you can limit the products by keywords.
The final step is to define your store’s appearance. This is just the basic stuff – fonts, text, background and link colors, but it also allows use of a custom logo. You can choose to include or remove Amazon “widgets” and upsells, like editorial reviews, wish lists, listmania, accessories, et. al. At the end of the process you choose whether you want to implement your store in an iframe, a frameset, or an external link. Copy a few lines of code, paste them into your site and voila – instant store!
One really nice feature of aStores is that the product details are displayed on your site along with Amazon customer reviews and ratings, related products and, best of all, your own shopping cart! That’s right – visitors don’t leave your site until they actually check out – a feature that I expect would greatly improve the customer’s shopping experience, resulting in increased sales!
A drawback: Currently, you are limited to having one store – you can’t define multiple stores for the same associate account.
It’s also worth mentioning that embedding these few lines of code into your website doesn’t in itself provide any interesting fodder for search engines. However aStores is a very easy way to seamlessly integrate product sales from a trusted merchant into your existing site.
[tags]affiliate marketing, affiliate programs, internet marketing[/tags]