It's the aStore now, the latest from Amazon.com for their Associates. The aStore lets Associates creates a professional online store in a matter of minutes minutes without the need for programming skills, and it can be embedded within or linked to from your present website.
Put most simply - this is a way to add a shop to your blog (similar to Chitika’s shoplinc - the main difference being that Shoplincs are CPC (cost per click - you get paid if someone clicks) and aStores are CPA (cost per action - you get paid if someone buys something) The payment amounts and methods are the same as normal for Amazon associates.
The other difference is that you can host shoplinc’s on your own domain and aStores are on Amazon’s.
Here’s one I set up a as a trial, maxBLITZ Online Store. It took me only a couple of minutes to make (more like ten, actually) so it’s obviously a very quick and easy set up. There are options for different templates and customizations as well as the ability to include virtually any product in Amazon’s database.
Within the same site I have also created an iframe integration setup from one of my spare domains, which I think will have to be given much more thought to.
First Impressions
My first impression is that it’s pretty good. Very simple to set up, nice to look at, easy to navigate and probably not too hard to integrate into your blog if you are into earning some returns from your blog(s).
It’s great to be able to run it on your own domain name (although much more work is needed) and to have even more control over the look and feel of your page (as everyone wants one).
Also I’d love to be able to have multiple aStores per affiliate account so that those of us with multiple sites could have multiple aStores.
Lastly I’d love to be able to choose products in categories and sub category pages. While you do have some control over this by picking keywords there’s no way of selecting specific products on these pages like you can on your front/featured page. This means you could be seen to be recommending products that you might not want to promote.
I suspect it’s early days for aStore. Hopefully they’ll continue to develop it. It is only in beta so I guess it’s not too bad for a start from Amazon.
