I’ve been a long-time affiliate at Amazon.com and was pretty psyched to learn about the oddly-named Omakase program that they recently rolled out (see What is Amazon Omakase?). Last time I logged in to my Associates account, I saw that they now also have an “aStore” program? What’s Amazon aStores all about, Dave?
As we’re learning, the summer of 2006 seems to be the season of innovation for the long unchanged Amazon Associates program, and all I can say is that it’s about time!
The specific aStore program that you’re asking about addresses one of the greatest complaints I have heard from Amazon Associates: it’s darn hard to pull together a set of Amazon products and integrate it into your site without using complex and confusing toolkits or scripts. No longer!
Let’s step through creating a basic Amazon aStore and you’ll see just what I mean!
Start by logging in to your Associates account and you’ll notice on the left nav bar a new option aStore and, for now at least, a big ad on the page too:
As their prose suggests, an aStore really is a different sort of beast, one that lets you have a shopping cart for multiple item purchase, lets you have pages appear that offer detailed product information, and more. Finally!
The first page someone will see when they visit your own aStore is the “Featured Products” page, which can include up to nine products. To select them, click on the “Build an aStore Now” button and you’ll see:
As you can see, I haven’t yet selected anything. For my demo, I’m going to select some of my favorite business books and sneak in a book that I wrote too. The first selection will be Guy Kawasaki’s splendid The Art of the Start. I type that into the search box and am promptly shown a table with all matching products within the Amazon database:
I select the first, which is the correct title, and the cover pops into the little 3×3 grid. After a few minutes work I’ve added a bunch of other great books, including John Battelle’s The Search, Tom Peter’s Re:Imagine!, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, Debbie Weil’s The Corporate Blogging Book and Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail.
You can — and certainly should — add an annotation or description of your own for each of your featured products too. Here’s how it looks as I’m adding a note for the splendid New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (okay, they’re not all business books):
Once I’ve written all my little descriptions for these books, I scroll to the bottom and click on “Continue”, which then lets you specify specific categories of goods you’d like to make available on your Amazon aStore. As Amazon describes it “Category pages will automatically present products from Amazon.com’s inventory. In addition, due to the extensive inventory available on Amazon.com, you can further streamline the content of a category to only include products that contain specific keywords.”
I chose a few categories, and then could select sub-categories too, making it easy to fine-tune the products that will be available in my Amazon store. I selected two primary categories, “Books” and “Magazine Subscriptions” and then indicated which subset of those categories I’d like included too.
Next step is to select the color, design and theme, which is nicely displayed:
Kudos to them for the little letter balloons, making it quite easy to see what’s what. Scroll down just a bit and you’ll see that you can specify a store title and a logo too:
Almost done. Next step is to figure out the layout you’d prefer, from whether your navigational elements should be on the left or right to whether you’d like to enable a wide variety of different “widgets”:
I opt to include just about everything — why not? — and, finally, click on “Finish & get link” and here’s the result:
I applaud Amazon for building this slick new tool and encourage you to poke around on my new aStore (and don’t hesitate if you want to buy one of those books and earn me a little affiliate commission 🙂
i have created a Category and Subcategory for my aStore, yet when I try to continue the Category/Subcategory structure the Subcategories will not appear on the aStore page unless the Category is clicked. I would like the Subcategories to be visible on the page under each Category link. How do I make Subcategories visible?
David, check with the online help on Amazon for details of how subcategories work on the aStore. That should cover what you’re asking…
Thank you so much for this wonderful information. I have been unemployed for 6 months. Advancements in technology essentially made my job description obsolete. I hope this works for me — it can’t hurt. May God bless you richly!
Very nice walkthrough of how to create and implement an amazon aStore. Unfortunately I’ve found that the Amazon’s aStore has too many limitations to make it truly useful for Internet Marketing. The way that Amazon has implemented them with iFrames makes it extremely hard to promote a stand alone store.
Dave:
Your article on Amazons astore was most helpful and I am setting my first one up. However, I have run into a problem as I cannot complete steps 4 & 5 of embedding my store using an inline frame.
After copying the highlighted HTML button I went to the first page of my website and clicked “view page source” which I think brought me to the HTML page I selected in Step 2.
Once there I could not paste what I had copied as the right click button of my mouse did not bring up anything that said paste.
Also, if you can tell me how to do the above, I still do not know how to add a “Store link”. Thanks in advance for your help. It will be most appreciated. Ron
Hi,
I am using astore for a while and getting pretty much success with it. In my opinion, the classical “Store” is a waste of time. Instead you have to use widgets and links of specific products that useres are searching. So, first write a good post about a product and get it SEOed to be in the top 5 of google. Then add a widget of that product and you can be sure, people will follow that link to Amazon to know more about the product and other reviews about it. Good luck!
Hello,
I’m working my mother with our astore on Amazon. How do I add banners and links to the Amazon astore website? Do I have to have a special website editor? What about adding widgets?
Thanks.
The aStore can be a great little addition to your website if you want to include a “store” in your website.
I’ve tried it in the past, and had a few sales and a little Amazon commission. Rather than just toss up anything in the aStore, I’d guess that most of us selected certain products for a reason.
I’ve found it’s more powerful and profitable to tell why an item is included. For example, writing a post about each item and why it’s important, what impact it’s had, and so on and then linking back to Amazon has proved much better.
Give both methods a try if you feel adventurous. 🙂
I wonder how I can integrate my Amazon aStore into my Lime Domains enlightenedcomputers.com domain? Do I use the DNS Management to embed HTML? Can I forward from my Lime Domains domain? This is my first aStore. Do I need a page to embed the aStore? Can the aStore stand alone?
Hi,
I am just wondering whether it is possible to customize the transaction page after the “checkout”. Ideally it redirects to the amazon website. I want all the shopping to continue on my website. So the bottom line is that i dont want the user to know that he is actually shopping on amazon.
Pls reply whether this is possible and how.
Thanks,
Anup
What are the ways to promote your aStore?
I suppose it’s better to have a niche than the whole store.
Does anyone make money, besides pennies, this way?
Great idea, thanks for the know-how Dave, will try!
I make very good use of the astore tools and currently have several that match my website pretty darn good. I use my own site as well as links to others and it’s been a great tool to work with.
Hi, i’m a new astore and I have finished my astore.
the-titles.blogspot.com
bonaficio.storebrander.com
then, what should I do more? I need more suggestions. thanks
Dave-
Can you please help me with a technical question? I have an Amazon aStore widget on my contact page but it falls off the edge of the page. The template is longer than the page. When i view the HTML to shorten the width, it deletes the whole widget.
Is there a way for me to edit the size so that the enitre widget can be seen??
Thanks for this simple tutorial.
Just created Amazon aStore by using your tutorial.
If you have an Amazon aStore or normal Amazon store, you can added it to the Squidoo directory http://best.amazon-stores.ever.com/
You do need to be a Squidoo member to add your site, but Squidoo is free (in fact, they pay you for your pages you create). There’s a link at the top of the page.
Hi Dave,
I like the tutorial, but it has come along way since you wrote this article, with new features being added all the time I really like the new create text links function and wrote a little tutorial (http://build.your.own.amazon.aStore.googlepages.com/textlinks) for them on my website that may prove useful!
And some of the ways you can use the banners/reccomend product ads are great and really adaptable! I’ll be adding more stuff to my tutorial soon!
Sorry… Dave, not Darren
After having my own issues with aStore’s feature set, I decided to enhance it on my own. I setup aSensibleStore.com, which tracks statistics, allow you to ad AdSense ads and allows you to include your aStore directly in your code without iFrames.
Please use the contact form on the website if you have any questions or new features you’d like to see.
Hello everyone, take it from me – aStore is nothing but a cheap gift from Amazon.com which doesn’t hold much worth. If you compare any highly selling product by looking at the description on an aStore page and an Amazon website listing then you’d be shocked to see that Amazon is supplying very small amount of text to aStore shops. In other words, product description is insufficient, aStore interface is a bit childish (customers won’t take aStore seriously) and above all compare the number of customer reviews and images posted on the main Amazon site and the aStore site. Why would someone quit Amazon’s main site and buy a high or a mdeium priced product from aStore?
In short aStore is not worth trying unless Amazon decides to make it more mature,information rich and more interactive.
hi,
I am thinking of starting a niche blog. It is pretty academic and related to my discipline. Iwoud like to us both Google (for their depth) and AStore (for their specificity eg: books, equipment etc..). Could I use both of them on my blog? Is there a conflict of interest?
Great article Dave.
I like the aStore concept too so I wrote a free downloadable PHP script (at http://www.adbabel.com/astore-seo/ ) so bots can crawl aStore’s as if hosted on the affilate’s site.
It’s pretty easy to set up so please try it out and let me know what you think.