Do You Sell Books? Try out the Amazon aStore Beta

I just learned about the Amazon aStore Beta in a blog post on Linda Buquet’s “5 Star Affiliate Programs” site.

So, to see how ‘easy’ it was (or wasn’t) I built a one-page Internet Marketing Book store by embedding the Amazon aStore into one of my pages using an iframe.

Ignore the way the header graphic looks on that page.

I stretched the orginal from 740 pixels wide to 800 pixels wide to make the aframe fit my page. If I was going to build a ‘real’ bookstore using the aStore, I’d have create a new header graphic. Unfortunately, if your page is any narrower than about 700, the right-hand column gets pushed off the page.

Other than that, creating the store is pretty easy. You just:

1. Choose either categories or individual products that you want to display.
2. Give the page a name.
3. Select a theme or input colors for the Amazon portion of the page.
4. Give your bookstore a title.
5. Choose either a right or left-hand sidebar.
6. Select which options you’d like to display in the sidebar.
7. Click “Finish” and get a simple link for to your store, or a link to embed your store in either an inline frame or a frameset.

I thought the standalone store version was pretty bad.

So, I tried the frameset option, but found that the inline frame was easier to use. All I had to do was cut and paste my usual headers and footers around the Amazon aStore link.

As Linda pointed out, the drawback to keeping visitors in a frame on your site is that they can see that they are not on a secure server.

To get around this problem, she suggested adding something like “All orders go through Amazon’s secure order server” to the top of your pages. Good idea!

Learn more about Amazon aStore.

Cheers ~ Ros

Popularity: 2% [?]