I'm trying Amazon aStore sites

RSK3000 · Feb 10, 2009

I thought I'd experiment with Amazon aStore minisites as an alternative to domain parking.

Anyone tried this and if so was it successful?

I have set up a few experimental sites to see what sort of results I will get:-

Melodicas.co.uk
CountryRock.co.uk
PortableFans.co.uk

Set up is easy. The problem is that people have to buy something before you earn anything

.

I'll report back once I have some results good or bad to report.

Anyone else tried this?

GreyWing · Feb 10, 2009

Parking is finished anyway mate, pays sode all now. Nothing to lose if it's not against therms terms and conditions, crack on.

RSK3000 · Feb 10, 2009

Never thought of that................I have had a look at their Terms and found nothing preventing use of the aStore in that way.

woopwoop · Feb 12, 2009

I think that it's good what you're doing and really just depends on traffic. Get good traffic to the domain and you'll make a few sales.

I would try and add more content to the sites you listed above otherwise I think it'll be difficult to get ranked and to get other people linking to you.

My best example is Morecambe.

You can see that there's a banner at the top. Click it and you go through to my aStore which is just like yours. It's a specific group of books which are selling to users who arrive at the site looking for stuff to do with Morecambe.

On the other end of the spectrum, look at student books. Not an aStore, but it is an amazon affiliate site. Full search functionality with results showing up within the site. Also a few other features and bits of student related content.

Good luck.

accelerator · Feb 12, 2009

I have an aStore experiment running at my Sat Nav site and I've made some sales.

The main challenge you are going to have is getting search engine placement. I don't use the aStore on my home page so that I can do on-page optimisation on my home page.

If you leave your sites as is, you will need to do off-page optimisation, i.e. lots of inbound links, to get placement.

Rgds

bensd · Feb 12, 2009

I have an aStore site on Simpsons DVDs.

Domain was reg'd, site put up and indexed in January and so far i have made £2.02. Not a great deal but if it carries on this way it will pay for the reg, hosting and have a couple of quid left over.

Accelerator is right though, you need to get traffic to the site to make any money. Simpsons DVDs is on the first page of google.co.uk for the term "Simpsons DVDs".

RSK3000 · Apr 14, 2009

I thought some people might appreciate some quick feed back on the progress of this experiment.

I started this about 8 - 10 weeks or so ago.

The three sites I developed have few backlinks and no content. There might be some type in traffic. Over the last 8 - 10 weeks only £0.80 was earned in total and that was from one sale.

Does that mean that Amazon aStores are a viable alternative to parking. I think they might be and there is always the possibility of relatively high earnings because Amazon uses tracking cookies last for 7 days (?) which means that you earn revenue on anything bought during the week after the visit.

It is also worth bearing in mind that the last 8 - 10 weeks were not the best trading conditions. Additionally, 10 weeks is perhaps too short a period to draw any final conclusions.

Overall I'm optimistic but only time will tell.

devolution · Apr 15, 2009

woopwoop said:
On the other end of the spectrum, look at student books. Not an aStore, but it is an amazon affiliate site. Full search functionality with results showing up within the site.

Are you using the ASM2 script or another one

?

woopwoop · Apr 15, 2009

devolution said:
Are you using the ASM2 script or another one?

Not exactly sure what asm2 is. Mine's a custom script which uses php and xml. Check out the amazon developer pages for details and examples of other sites. They've got some useful forums and a lot of developer tools.

mistrymit · Apr 16, 2009

amazon site

i've used the amazon ghostscriptor php script to develop my amazon site at

www.boxedgifts.co.uk

at first was using astore and at that point wanted to sell to domain name but came across this script after searching through many other scripts

1 year on now, has a pagerank 2 and have made many sales since, no ppc or seo or link building done.

sales still popping through every now and then. but need to more work on developing the site as not done so in many months, but thought i'd share my amazon exp

regards
m

retired_member16 · Apr 16, 2009

The Amazon cookie expires after 24hrs, not 7 days.

retired_member26 · Apr 21, 2009

woopwoop said:
On the other end of the spectrum, look at student books. Not an aStore, but it is an amazon affiliate site. Full search functionality with results showing up within the site. Also a few other features and bits of student related content.

Good luck.

Interesting. According to the amazon UK official policy the buyer should "confirm" the product he is buying before redirected to amazon.co.uk. How he can send buyer directly to the amazon.co.uk?

TurNIC

devolution · Apr 21, 2009

Turnic, that 'confirmation' thing ("do you want to add these items to your Amazon shopping cart?") I believe is only when using 3rd party shopping carts, like AOM etc. If your links just go straight to the item page on Amazon, then that's fine.
However, I feel sales have dropped a lot since they introduced that 'confirmation' step on Amazon.co.uk - it's not on Amazon.com. Guess it must be some kind of EU regulations or something about transparency.

woopwoop · Apr 21, 2009

turnic said:
Interesting. According to the amazon UK official policy the buyer should "confirm" the product he is buying before redirected to amazon.co.uk. How he can send buyer directly to the amazon.co.uk?

TurNIC

Do you mean how can I send the buyer to amazon.co.uk or the OP ???
If me, I don't believe that my student books site breaks any of the rules. After all I am just sending people to products via an affiliate link. That's the fundamental nature behind most affiliate schemes.

But I remember when the coding was being done I had an option to code it where a site visitor selected could select a few products and keep adding them to a local cart and then when they want to pay they go over to the Amazon site.

Might update the site to do this later - will check if it's worthwhile but unless Amazon's rules have changed, I'll probably keep things as is.

devolution said:
Turnic, that 'confirmation' thing ("do you want to add these items to your Amazon shopping cart?") I believe is only when using 3rd party shopping carts, like AOM etc. If your links just go straight to the item page on Amazon, then that's fine.
However, I feel sales have dropped a lot since they introduced that 'confirmation' step on Amazon.co.uk - it's not on Amazon.com. Guess it must be some kind of EU regulations or something about transparency.

Devolution I think this is what turnic is confused about.

What I explained above was a way to have a local 'holding' cart (which isn't a 3rd party method of accepting payment) just a way of holding the whole order together on your site while the visitor is still browsing and adding, then send the cart contents to Amazon's billing when the user goes to complete the order. This is another nice option for someone in the planning stages of an amazon site.