Web Design Articles
articles indexSet Up An Amazon aStore
6 February 07
There are several ways you can try to make money from running your own web site, among these is a wide range of advertising and affiliate schemes.
One of the more interesting options to appear in the last few months is provided by Amazon.com as part of its Associates affiliate service.
The Amazon aStore is a shopping store you can integrate into your own web site, and then sell products from the Amazon site that you think your visitors might be interested in.
So, for a web site about music, you could set up categories like Rock and Dance and then let Amazon automatically display a list of top-selling CDs from its range, with prices, cover images, information and reviews.
Visitors to your store can add items to a shopping cart and then be taken to the Amazon web site for secure purchasing. As the webmaster you will receive a percentage of the price of products bought through your aStore.
You could spend a lot of time building your aStore and choosing particular categories and specific products to sell. Thankfully Amazon's system is straightforward and easy to use.
You can customise much of the look of your aStore to fit your site's own colour scheme. When finished, you can link to the store as a standalone page. Alternatively, you can integrate it into your own page by simply copying and pasting a small piece of code (though you may need to adjust your CSS or table widths to accomodate the aStore iframe within your page).
As with most affiliate schemes there is no guarantee that you will make a lot of money from running an Amazon aStore, however it seems like an interesting idea with a lot of potential. It's also free to set one up, so it's certainly worth a try.
Ultimately the success of aStore for your web site will depend on a number of factors, including getting your visitors to feel confident about buying from your store and how well you integrate the aStore and product links into your existing web site.
