Affiliate Stores

The Amazon aStore is potentially one of the easiest ways to get a niche store up and running.

Amazon provide the coded solution and you customise your store to contain as few or as many products with your own custom categories and colour scheme.

Unfortunately, conversion from a standalone store will never be great. As ever, traffic and on and off-site optimisation is the key, but the aStore falls down on capability to have onsite optimisation, given that the site can never truly be hosted on your own domain. As such, organic search engine traffic will tend to be low unless good solid content can bring in the customers. The aStore does not give you any content.

The aStore is either hosted on your site via a frame or by forwarding your domain to the Amazon aStore and doesn’t get much, if at all, credit from the search engines.

Given that I recently posted about remote file includes which efectively pulls HTML into your own page from any given URL, I started thinking that it SHOULD be possible to redirect a request on your domain to an Amazon aStore retrieval engine hosted on your server and serve back the pure HTML that the search engines love over javascript and inline frame redirects.

Now I don’t think that I am Brain of Britain and figured out that someone else may have had the same idea - and indeed they had …. see http://www.astoreproxy.com.

I would have loved to bring you a review, but crazily the only contact email on the site bounces back from HostGator with an ‘email address does not exist’ message.

The idea is now on my to-do, but I hate reinventing the wheel, therefore if you have tried out the astoreproxy solution or have already developed one of your own, then I would love to hear from you with feedback as to how well it worked and whether Search engine organic traffic increased as a result.

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