Amazon.com launched the Product Previews Beta program a while back and holds an open invitation for Amazon Affiliates to join and respond to this program.
Product Previews works just like a placement ad actually, where when you hover over an activated or preview-enhanced link, a pop up window will appear with information about the product you are linking to. The window includes an image (if available), new and used price, average customer review and availability, and last, but not least, the Amazon 'Buy now' button with which you add the item directly to your Amazon.com shopping cart.
This preview-enhancement link comes in two parts, the first being a hidden link enhancer Javascript which you place somewhere on you page, preferably at the end, on which you are going to add the Product Preview link. Second is the product link itself, the URL being what you normally for Amazon product links,
For websites that uses a template system, all you need to do is to add the enhancer script in the footer section of your template, make sure it is above the final "body" tag, save, republish, and Product Preview will probably be available over your whole site.
Since the Product Preview is still in Beta, Amazon.com has opted on a 50/50 chance that you, the viewer, will get to see the Product Preview in action while the other half will just see a linked product, which when clicked, will take you to Amazon.com.
Take a look at the book links on this page as an example, if you see it with dashed underscores (_ _ _ _) then Product Preview is working for you. Hover over the link, preview the product and click on the 'Buy now' button to have the product added to your shopping cart.
If you see just a plain link, with a straight line underscore (______), then you will not enjoy the benefit of Product Preview. Just click on the link instead and it will take you to the product page at Amazon.com.
You can however, induce Amazon.com to display Product Previews for you. Do this by first removing the Product Preview cookie that Amazon.com has set for your browser. If you are using Firefox, click in the 'Tools' tab at the top of your browser screen, pick 'Options..' from the drop-down menu, open up the 'Privacy' section of your Tools, expand and View the Cookies listing. Browse through your cookies list, and in this case, look for and remove this cookie:
what-is-asm Amazon_vf
Save, access (reload) this page again. If it does not work the first time, give it a couple more tries. It should work by then.
Could be an interesting notion on how to enhance your content pages with product recommendations or how to give static content pages of your AWS script store a bit more bite.
