A vested interest among webmasters using ASM2 (as well as many others using commonly available scripts, free or otherwise) is to avoid sites that are duplicates of one another, or sites that have very similar content. Site duplication could be in the form of one webmaster having one site too many (offering almost no change in content), or many webmasters sharing the same script with which they do nothing more than just install and run.
One of the downsides of having duplicate sites is the chance of being penalised by search engines which will push your site down the ranking order until almost obscurity.
In ASM2, or Amazon Store Manager Version 2, a free Amazon affiliate script by Roger of Freekrai.net we found a very robust ad a very easy script not only to install and run but also to customize for specialized products or to create product niche stores.
Customizing for Product Niches
Our approach to customization for product niche stores is to work on any one or a combination of areas detailed below.
Selective product modes (categories)
Different/expanded product nodes
Customized navigation structure
Integration of external scripts/sources
Selective product modes (categories)
ASM2's listing of Amazon.com's 30 over product categories is listed in the script/nodes/us_browse.inc file. This is the core product category file whose listing is used both as the default menu items, default category display and as the main index for product search functions.
To reduce the number of product categories, or to preselect only specific categories for a basic niche product store, edit the script/nodes/us_browse.inc file by adding hashes (#) in front of the catogories you want disabled. As shown in the listing below, your niche product store will now be of Baby, Beauty and Book products only.
Different/expanded product nodes
Each of the product category in the script/nodes/us_browse.inc file is linked to a $nodes[ ] category in the script/nodes/us.inc file, which is a listing of child nodes of that specific parent (node). The child node numbers corresponds to the actual pages of Amazon.com products.
Expanding (adding more nodes from product subsections, for example), reducing or even doing a completely news nodes listing (say only from a specific subsection of the product category) would then be the next natural extension to your product niche stores.
Harvesting product nodes from Amazon's pages itself can be tedious and time consuming. A help in this area is to look for websites that offer browsenode lookup services, which will collate and group the nodes for easy transfer to your ASM2 *.inc files.
One that comes to mind, especially designed for ASM2 node harvesting is BrowseNode.name, authored by myhart, an esteemed member of the Affiliate Developer forum. Cut and paste the nodes to our Browse Node Templates and you'll have a good head start in customizing your stores for different or expanded product ranges.
Customized navigation structure
The main menu listing (in the menu column of course) of ASM2 script is managed by the %%leftNav%% variable (embedded in the script/templates/header.tpl file) which calls up the contents of the script/nodes/us_browse.inc files for display.
Having a small niche product store, say of a single product category, means that we are going to have a single menu item list. This dosen't look very inviting, does it? Our answer to this situation is to by-pass the %%leftNav%% function and hard-code our own menu items list.
This customization is fairly straightfoward, open up script/templates/header.tpl in you favorite word editor, and replace the %%leftnav%% line with your own product call lines. The example listed below are the call line which can be used for a Baby Products niche Store.
This listing is of course, can be easily collated from BrowseNode.name
Integration of external scripts/sources
Away from the notion of working on the script itself is our trial at integrating external scripts or other contents (such as information text pages like this one) sources.
We simplify this effort by first creating the Integratiom template and subsequently initiated the integration of a few free PHP scripts sourced from HotScripts.com and other sources.
The few tutuorials that we have on integrating external scripts into ASM2 are listed here.
