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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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for putting light on this subject, its higly appreciated.
You can do it and much more with StoreBrander.com free public service
Hey dont worry about optimising the store itself, optimise what you already have, I bought the domain bedguard.co.uk because of the amount of traffic the keyword \bed guard\ recieves. I was lucky to get the domain. I’ve seo’d the site to the best of my ability and added my astore after in an iframe. http://www.bedguard.co.uk
Take a look, its number one on yahoo under \bed guard\ and \bed guards\.
Its position 7 or 8 on google under bed guard i think.
Love Amazon associates!
@Rich,
Whilst I agree that you have integrated the aStore nicely within a frame and given it some natural and optimised content, I don’t think that you could achieve the same result for your keywords on a different domain.
If the keyword works for you, then I agree that having the domain name is a great bonus, if not essential.
You sparked me to look at some of my domains to see the SEO effect of keyword rich domain names and concluded that it is extraordinarily important to get a keyword rich domain name.
Have a look at the article.
Optimise the site you are going to put the astore in. Do the best to concentrate on that. Check out http://www.bedguard.co.uk I must get at least one sale a day.
I’m number one in Yahoo under “bed guard” and “bed guards” on google at about 7th or 8th on the first page.
Hi Rich, i have visited your Bed Guard site. It is based on Joomla. This solution is interesting but iframe causes search engines will never index your category and item links.
Am i wrong?
Btw, what is your conversion rate? Thanks.
thanks for the information..really helpfull idea,could come in handy for anyone.
I think “bed guard” is now number 1 in google rankings although this month traffic has dropped by 30%
…maybe it is the time of year only 297 visitors over September compared to the highest in July at 636 visits, 592 unique.
Movies: Yes I have used joomla 1.5 to build my sites. You are correct I would not be able to optimise the individual links within the iframe. However I have tried to optimise round certain products, try “babydan bed guard” and “tomy bed guard” as search terms in google.
Conversion on sales compared to product clicks is about 20%, I earn an average of around £50 – £60 per month off Amazon through bedguard and around £10 with adsense. It is annoying that at the start of a new month my referral rate returns to 5%.
I am currently trying more sites such as http://www.kettlesandtoasters.com, http://www.pctoolkit.co.uk and working with a friend of mine who bought the domain denimleggings.co.uk.