A look at Amazon's aStore

I HAVE been using Amazon's aStore online shop now for a few weeks and thought I would post a few thoughts and things I've learnt.

Personally I've seen my sales of books exceed the figures pre-aStore so naturally I am very pleased.

Here is my shop based around France:

http://astore.amazon.co.uk/thisfrenchlif-21/

As you will see I've not used any iframes as I remain to be convinced how effective they are when search engines come round - I know my site is being spidered and have seen items appear in Google searches.

Another reason I am not a fan of iframes is that I want people to buy when in the aStore, so providing just the one link back to my main site ensures minimum 'leakage' and I am keeping my eye on this and may yet delete it.

Offering a collection of links to other parts of my site will only result in maximum 'leakage'!!!

I have also kept the design similar in style to my current site, This French Life.

You will see on This French Life that I have linked to the shop in the top left hand corner, this link appears on every page, and I also link to individual items in the right hand column.

I update these links on the right to point at items deep within my store, not the featured products, and highlight items from different categories.

I have also written an actual article for my French site to say that the store was up and running.

And that's it.

At the moment I am very pleased with the aStore and hope that Amazon allows people to create seperate shops as I have other sites not dealing with France - fingers crossed.

Comments

[David Walker]

I'm rather negative towards Amazon these days, with new initiatives just hiding the fact that affiliate revenues (percentages) falling all the time. I send as much traffic as ever to Amazon, but find my revenues are around a third of what they were three years ago.

I've not tried astore, but to be honest, I'm not sure it fits in with my rather 'niche' sites. Might give it a shot just for research purposes!

[AdSense aStore]

After trying out aStore’s feature set, I decided to enhance it a bit. I setup aSensibleStore.com, which tracks statistics, allows you to add AdSense ads and 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.

[mark]

um...how do you know that Amazon is crawling your site? Do you get stats from somewhere? I can see if your links appear in Google then that makes sense but beyond that?

[Craig McGinty]

Hi Mark
You are right, I can only tell by seeing links within Google searches.

Although the admin page within Amazon highlights the number of clicks within the store.

Not sure how reliable they are, but it is unlikely that my French site is sending so many people on its own to warrant the numbers I am seeing.

Hope this helps.