Amazon.com's Astore is easy to set up

 Amazon.com Astore

Amazon.com has a simple shopping cart option for anyone who wants to start a store selling Amazon products.

Amazon's Astore can be set up by anyone who registers as an Amazon affiliate.  It is easy to do on their website.  You can follow their steps with no extra explanation.

Adding Products

Astore lets you add products by category or individually after doing a key word search.  If you want to have a well defined niche store then having hand selected products will make sure that your customers see what is for your niche.  If you have a site that is about a general theme, it is very likely that you will find an Amazon.com category for the same issue.  Amazon Astore categories have many subcategories, so it would be easy to make a catalog of categories in categories just for your area.  You don't have to follow their category sequence. You can rearrange the order of categories and subcategories according to your needs.

Themes

Amazon's Astore lets you modify several colors and even modify the .css file.  There are only two actual themes to install on the site. You can also change the font size.

Product listings

Products that are added as categories are normally pretty good however I noticed on one catalog how some items were linked correctly.  For example: I saw some women's clothing items show up in the men's clothing category when I viewed a store that I had set up.

Reporting

Amazon's Astore reports one day late. I can see yesterday's report today.  The report is not updated at midnight. It is updated by morning. The reporting options are decent.  You can see reports on sales, type of link, and store code/tracking ID among others. You can set up multiple tracking IDs in the affiliate control panel. Each Astore has to have its own tracking ID.  The tracking IDs can also be used for other kinds of links. It makes sense to give each website that you own and its astore a different ID. When you make a sale, you will know which site sent it.

 How it works

When you are an Amazon affiliate, you earn a commission on any sale is made through your Astore or your Amazon links within 24 hours of a click. This is handled by cookies.  This period is very short and I hope they change it.  I am sure many commissions are lost because the customer decides to wait a day or two to confirm his or her order.  They offer a sliding scale on commissions starting at 4%, but it doesn't apply to all products.  You can read all about the commission rate on their affiliate website when you register.

How to get it on your site

You can have your Astore as:

• A stand alone site (you can link to it from other sites)


• Embed it as a frame (you do remember when people used frames, don't you?)


• Embed it as an iframe (include it inside your site's content for example inside a DIV)

Amazon does not currently offer integration in any CMS or other software.  The easiest way to add it to your CMS is to add it as a link in a menu or sidebar.

Feedback

What have your experiences been using Amazon's Astore?