Amazon Associates is Amazon’s affiliate program, which allows web publishers and webmasters to receive referral fees from their users who buy stuff from Amazon through their sites. Very recently, Amazon came up with the aStore, which is a nice way to set up targeted items on your site in a manner that is seamless and well integrated. You get to choose Featured Products on the first page, configure categories and subcategories, select the right look and feel for your aStore and incorporate various Amazon features such as a Search box, Listmania, Similar Products, your Wishlist and Reviews. To give it your site’s identity, you can even add a logo and use your site colors.

To incorporate the aStore to your site, you can do so via

  • a link to an external standalone store
  • an inline frame that generates an embedded store
  • a frameset that generates an embedded store

So all in all, it seems like a marvelous feature to add to your space….in theory. I tried it, and it’s not bad. But here’s what’s still missing:

  • You can only create one aStore per associate account. If you run more than one site, you’ll need to create multiple accounts in order to have multiple aStores. What a pain.
  • If you decide to link to an external aStore rather than embed the store in your site, you will find that once you jump to the store, there is no way to get back to your originating site other than the back button. So if your user gets engrossed in the reverie of their shopping experience in your aStore, and find themselves several pages deep, needless to say they will be stuck in your store with no means to get back to your blog without punching that back button several times over. If they don’t remember your URL, then sayonara! No fun. The workaround is to use one of the embedded store scenarios.
  • The Search can be tinkered with to provide more relevant results via filtered keywords. But the catch is, it does not yet support operators such as “,”, “+”, “and”, or “or” in the search. Which simply means you can only set your search to be limited to ONE theme if you decide to use this feature! But what if you want to provide a broader yet still specific spectrum of products? You can’t — not with their search box limitation. So you’re stuck with NOT using a filtered keyword search at all — that is, your categories will not be targeted, which sucks. There’s a hack for this which involves fashioning a query string and tagging it with a “keywords” parameter like so:

    http://astore.amazon.com/silkwillow-20/search/002-3084472-6072859?
    node=22&keywords=Business

    which will give you this instead of this.

    What this implies is that if you want to have multiple filtered keywords available from your site, then you can do so by manipulating the query string and creating an index page in your site that links to various query strings. If this is all gibberish to you, that’s fine — the point is that you’ll have to do a little hacking if you want a variety of filtered products via the aStore’s search box. But really who wants to go through all that trouble when you can just wait patiently for Amazon to fix these limitations?

But because the aStore is in BETA, I can forgive its shortcomings for now. I’ll live with it since I would rather have the wider product selection than implement its red-headed stepbrother the “Recommended Product Links”. Ok that’s not so bad either but after the experience of the aStore, it’s hard to go back.

 
 
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