At the risk of repeating myself, Amazon aStores are potentially a really good earner.
Unfortunately the default iFrame installation is never likely to earn you anything as it has no search engine benefits at all and will be ignored by Google and other search engines.
As you know, I try to keep a lookout for Affiliate tools that might just give you an edge. I might now just have found a way of delivering an aStore that delivers on that promise.
StoreBrander is the service.
You may select a storebrander subdomain e.g. mystore.storebrander.com or you can actually choose to point your top level domain at storebrander.com and serve your aStore from there.
Why use Storebrander?
Well … more than 1 or two reasons actually :
1. Rather than your site being built on an iFrame that the search engines ignore, the site serves pure HTML meaning that your site content is fully visible and indexable by the search engines. This is acheivable by seving your aStore via a proxy that gets the store data from Amazon and re-serves it in a pureHTML format.
2. There are extra opportunities for monetisation as StoreBrander includes Google options by default and by simply including your publisher and ad IDs, they will automatically be included within your site.
You can even include an Amazon search … which includes Amazon custom search which can limit searches to your own site portfolio and keep directing visitors to your own site offers.
3. For free, you have the option of uploading your own HTML template … there is a {/brandedstore} tag required to include the Amazon aStore, but other than that, you have complete freedom to set up your own aStore layout, which may include headers and other sidebars to blend in with your main store.
StoreBrander is a really interesting solution for the reasons that I give above. Whilst it may not work for everyone in the affiliate space, I certainly encourage folks to give it some investigation if you previously thought that aSores had no merit.
Only one issue I found so far … it seems impossible to serve up both the www and non-www to the same site. In order to achieve that I had to set up two sites www and non-www with the same template and aStore. This may put some people off. I tried everything I could think of with DNS settings setting up new A and CNAME records, but I still ended up back at two versions of the site, albeit visuually identical.
If you want a look at a sample site, then have a look at one of my undeveloped sites (http://www.dvdbrowser.co.uk) that I have placed on StoreBrander for you to see.
Do also go to the non-www version. Whilst it appears to be the same site, the internal links are also non-www.
I personally hold no opinion whether www and non-www versions are actually seen as duplicate content … you will need to make up your own mind as to whether that is a negative for you.
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi, thanks for providing another solution like the original aStore Proxy. I just visited your website http://www.dvdbrowser.co.uk to see this new service and I am getting “The server at http://www.dvdbrowser.co.uk is taking too long to respond”. Do you recommend using a free service like this potentially shared by many affiliates and resulting in slow performance? How has your experience been? I need to decide between going for a free solution like this versus buying the aStore Proxy script. Appreciate your suggestions.
Personally, I would prefer to have something that I could host myself and be in control, but I haven’t found anything yet where you can create a template around the aStore.
I think that you may have been unlucky when you visited the site … I have never had any response time issues with Storebrander.
I have just put an astore together built around the magento eccomerce platform, it sort of helps combat the pure evil that is “iframes”
see what you think : GadgetViper
Hi there Sytun.
That’s quite a nice looking front page.
I am a bit confused by your comment about combating iFrames though. Isn’t it true that your inner pages are still using iFrames to display the Amazon aStore … and the products will still not be found by the search engines e.g. I found the following :
HI David,
Yes all the inner pages use the iframe, there is no getting around that but by using the Magento eccommerce platform along side the astore iframe allows me to introduce my own additional menu system, meta tags, titles and content, I’ve also taken content from inside the iframe and placed it directly into the site.
If you take a look at the source code for this page iPod Classic 120gb you will see that I have all the meta tags, the titles from my own menu system and all the “reviews” content is directly on the page as apposed to being hidden inside the iframe, the review text is pretty good for keyword density.
The most frustrating thing about the iframe other than it’s SEO limitations is the inability to autosize the iframe to suit the content, I cannot stand the scroll bar but i’m not sure whats worse, a scroll bar or a 4000 pixel high webpage.