Amazon aStore Beta
Amazon recently announced a product called Amazon aStore Beta. Put simply, it provides the ability to build an “Amazon Store” without any prior knowledge of HTML etc.
Needing some Christmas related products for our Christmas Songs site I decided to give aStore a try.
Here’s what I found
- The store is very simple to setup. I had something in place in about 5 minutes. This included a main and supporting pages with navigation and shopping cart.
- You can select pretty much any product from the Amazon range to go on the front page – then product groups by keyword on the inner pages
- There are a number of options to customise your site, these include changing colour schemes, displaying your logo at the top of each page, adding text to the top of each page and under each displayed item.
- Also included is the ability to provide simple links to the store (thats all I did for now), or embedding the store into a site using inline frames or framesets.
The first attempt was a simple clean looking store, higlighting a number of products I’m promoting. It has ample ability to grow as the list of promoted products expands. Click Here To See the Site
Overall it was very easy to use and provided very quick results. It could easily be integrated into a website. The product is still in Beta, so I’m sure there are more enhancements to come. A couple of improvements I’d love to see:
- The ability to have multiple stores, allowing affiliates to have one store per website
- To be able to select individual products in the subcategories – sometimes Amazons keyword selection is a little too broad.
- The ability to host the store on a website to
Tops marks to Amazon for a nice free tool. This could be perfect for anyone wanting to start their own free home based business.
Update on 3 October:
The next release of aStore (currently slated for a late November release) will allow Associates to:
Build and maintain multiple aStores using a single Associate ID
Specify products to feature on Category and Sub-Category pages
Create multiple instances of individual categories and sub-categories (e.g. Beatles Music and Rolling Stones Music)
Feature up to 54 products on the front page of your store rather than the current limit of nine
Write longer custom product descriptions
Better control the layout and design for use in frames by providing the capability to remove the store header and category navigation
The list above is not all-inclusive as many other minor changes will be made to improve both the Associate and customer experiences.
Filed under: Resources
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