Nice to see a couple of new features on Amazon Associates. Firstly, there's a slightly new look. Nothing too major but a slightly more polished feel. Then, when you go to make a product link, it kindly tells you the top 10 products in a given category, which you can easily switch to another. This makes it nice and quick to pick up links for their bestselling products.

Ok, so far so good, but nothing too radical. But then go ahead and visit Amazon's website itself and you'll see you have a new "site stripe" at the top of the page which gives you two very cool function - "link to this page" and "add to aStore". Both of which will make creating links very much quicker.

It would be really nice if they could sort out the reporting as a priority though. I think I have read before that at the moment, they run some end of day batch job which calculates the affiliate reporting, but to me this gives a sense of detachment as it's so much cooler to be able to see on other programs and networks the money you are making in near real time.

Did I miss anything else that's new in the Amazon Associates makeover?

Labels: amazon

Amazon allows the creation of 100 tracking IDs on its Associate program. I like the Associate program and use it across a lot of sites and have actually run out of tracking IDs, but the thing is I don't use them all so wanted to delete some I have never used to create new ones in their place. If you're in the same boat, then you might have asked the same question as me:

"Can I Delete An Amazon Tracking ID?"

Well, in case you're wondering, the answer is no, you can't. I asked Amazon Associate support staff and they said this wasn't possible and the only solution would be to delete my account and start again. Yikes, a tad extreme me thinks. So think carefully before you create that next tracking ID - when they're gone, they're gone.

Labels: amazon

In Part 1, I showed how to construct a URL which would pull out data from Amazon's web services on the best selling Power Ranger toys. With that part done, it's now time to think about how we make use of that data by using it in a web page.

For this example, I am going to show you how I do this using VB in ASP.net. I realise that ASP.net is a bit of a minority interest and it seems like most people out there are using PHP. I will add tutorials for other options later on, but today I will just do ASP.net and for that you will need web hosting space which supports the .net framework.

Overview

ASP.net comes with some nice controls which you can easily bind to an XML data source. The only challenge here is that to use them in their simplest form, they like the XML source to be rather flat in structure. Unfortunately the XML from Amazon is quite complex and has many layers to it which makes it trickier than I like to bind to a data control. So the way I do it is in two steps:

1) Apply an XSLT transformation to the XML source to "flatten it" and just give me the data I want.
2) Bind the transformed XML to my data control.

There will surely be other ways to achieve the same goal, but this is the way I to do it to achieve the result I want with the skillset I have.

Use XSLT to Transform and Flatten the XML from Amazon

Amazon's Web Services have an XSLT processor which means you are able to apply an set of XSL rules to the XML it generates. I have written the following XSL tranformation which extracts key information from the AWS Large Response I mentioned in the previous post and outputs it as more simplified, flatter XML.

See XSL Transformation file (save with .xslt extension to use)

If you want to try following this example, you can save that text file as something like transform.xslt and upload it to your own webspace. I will also zip it up with and make it available for download with the web page source code which I will come to shortly.

Once it has been uploaded to some webspace that you have accessible to you, you then add a Style parameter to the querystring that we built in Part 1.

http://xml-uk.amznxslt.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&
Operation=ItemSearch&AWSAccessKeyId=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&
AssociateTag=toysandvideogames-21&&SearchIndex=Toys&
Title=Power%20Rangers&Sort=salesrank&ResponseGroup=Large&Style=http://mydomainname/transform.xslt

Bind the Data to a Web Page Control

Now that the source XML is a simplified form, it's very easy to bind to a data control in a webpage in asp.net. I won't explain too much but just give you the source code. It's really hard to paste code into Blogger without it kicking up a fuss so here's a link to the source code in a text file.

ASP.net Example Source Code

Replace the XXXXX in the code with the URL from Part 1 and then save that with a .aspx extension, upload it and then access it in the browser and it should look something like this.



There we have it - live product information from Amazon with the best selling Power Rangers toys. That's one way you can do it in asp.net using VB - I'm sure there are even better ways. I'll soon post up instruction on achieving the same using different development environments.

Use at your own risk - remember your web server needs to support asp.net

Any questions?

Labels: amazon, asp.net, aws, REST, web services, xml

Amazon's Web Services expose all their product information to developers using a couple of different methods: SOAP and REST. In this guide, I will look at how you can use REST, or XML over HTTP, to retrieve information. XML over HTTP is a URL-centric approach so the key to querying the Amazon data store is to construct a querying URL that has the right parameters to pull out the information you want. In this example, I am going to extract a list of bestselling Power Ranger toys from Amazon UK.

We start our URL with

http://

The first thing you need to do is then identify the right resource to connect to, which will depend on the regionality of the results you want. To extract information from Amazon UK web services, use:

xml-uk.amznxslt.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService

The next step is to define the mode of operation. For instance, are you searching for a set of results or looking up a specific item. For this example, we are searching for a set of results, so add in:

&Operation=ItemSearch

It's at this point that I add in the developer's key which you get when you sign up to Amazon Web Services.

&AWSAccessKeyId=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (replace the Xs with your own)

You also need to add a parameter with the Amazon associate ID you want to use, so that the results have it embedded in them, creating the trackable deeplinks which will earn you money.

&AssociateTag=toysandvideogames-21

Next step is to define the "SearchIndex" in which you want to search. Examples include DVDs, VideoGames, Kitchen or Blended to search across indices. In this example, I will use toys:

&SearchIndex=Toys

The next important parameter is to define the search text which will bring back the appropriate results. The parameter is the "Title":

&Title=Power%20Rangers (notice that spaces are replaced with "%20" so the URL is not broken)

I'm next going to define the order of the results. Like when you are on the Amazon site itself, you can see the results in all manner of ways such as alphabetically sorted, in price order or see the bestselling first. I think being able to get the data in order of sales rank is such a useful thing compared to the functionality of static product feed files provided by most affiliate networks. Here's how you do that:

&Sort=salesrank

There's one more parameter we need to add in which defines the amount of information that Amazon sends back in response to your query. There's quite a few differing options, but for this example and for simplicity, I will just use this parameter, which asks for a "Large" response.

&ResponseGroup=Large

Ok, now if you concatenate all the bold snippets above into one long URL, you will have your completed querystring for pulling out information on the bestselling Power Rangers toys at Amazon, and it should look something like this:

http://xml-uk.amznxslt.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&
Operation=ItemSearch&AWSAccessKeyId=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&
AssociateTag=toysandvideogames-21&SearchIndex=Toys&
Title=Power%20Rangers&Sort=salesrank&ResponseGroup=Large

The beauty of this is that you can test it instantly -just copy and paste what's above into the address bar of your internet browser and press enter and you will see XML data returned from Amazon with all the information on best selling Power Rangers toys (don't forget to watch out for line breaks when copying, and replacing the XXXs with your developer key from AWS).

Now that you have got the product data from Amazon in XML format, the next stage is to format it and display it on a web page so you can actually use it. There's a range ways to do that and I'll write about them in Part 2.

Labels: amazon, aws, REST, web services, xml

Something that I have noticed since using Amazon's Web Services is that quite often Google will index Amazon links with my associate ID in them, and rank them highly. It seems that when Google's crawling my site, somehow it takes one or two affiliate URLs and places them in the SERPs, usually as the top result, because they are actually pages on the Amazon domain, which obviously is a big authority domain.

Although Google crawls my site which has hundreds, or even thousands of AWS-generated links, only one or two will show up at any one time in the SERPs. I'm not entirely sure why it's happening, but it seems to last a day or two before disappearing, and then another one will spring up in its place. It's almost as if Google adds it to the SERPs, takes a day or two to realise it made a mistake and replace it with the plain Amazon link, but then makes the same mistake again and adds a new one to the SERPs.

I've never seen this happen with any of my plain text Associate links that I've created in the Associate control panel, only with links generated from the Web Services API. If you use the API and want to see if any of your links have been indexed and ranked (though a spike in sales for a specific product is usually a giveaway), you can use the allinurl operator on Google.

e.g. search for allinurl:associateid-20

(replace associateid and 20 with the right values for you!)

Put that down as another great reason to use Amazon's Web Services.

Labels: amazon, aws, web services

I bought my Sony DCR-SR32 a few weeks ago, and hadn't really used it much as I don't have much to review at the moment. What I had seen in my first few goes wasn't impressive but I tried to put that out of my mind as I didn't want to think I'd made a big error. Then I saw Vlad's post and comments where he revealed he had sent back his Sony camcorder from the same range, and I thought I better check mine more extensively.

After doing some more checking, I can confirm that the quality was awful. Natural light make it freak out, and straight edges appear very digitised and terrible to look at. I was actually shocked. I don't know much about cameras but i like the Sony brand and put my trust in them. It had a still camera onboard as well and that was some pathetic VGA quality which wasn't as good as my first camera phone from 3 years ago. The video camera on my normal still camera from Samsung was better than the Sony DCR-SR32.

I thought I was probably lumbered with the junk, but inspired by Vlad sending his back, I checked out Amazon's return procedure and found an option that allowed you to return it within 30 days for the reason "did not meet expectations". So I'm sending it back today but almost can't believe how easy it is to return (as I think that goes well beyond statutory rights), but will wait til the money's back in the bank before buying another.

Seeing the SR32 has made me evaluate what I want from a camcorder, and I'm now going to try something completely different like the Canon HV20 which has stunning results.

Whilst on the subject of Amazon, got to say a big thanks to the person that bought 40 USB Memory sticks (although he of course won't see it!) from my Amazon link the other day and pushed me up into the next performance tier with just a couple of days to go til month end. I love the randomness of people's purchasing!

Labels: amazon, camcorder, Sony DCR-SR32

I saw some stats in my Amazon sales figures which made me realise something I hadn't noticed before: if you're selling games consoles, Amazon destroys the competition.

Let's begin by looking at what other well known console retailers offer to affiliates:

GAME - 3% on hardware
Gamestation - 2% on consoles
HMV - 2% on consoles

Now I had an XBox 360 sale come through yesterday on Amazon. I'm currently on the Performance tiered scheme, and up to a default commission of 6%. On top of that, for sales that come from a direct link click through, you get an additional 2.5% premium. So my commission for the XBox 360 was a whopping 8.5% (which worked at about £18).

So unless I'm missing something very obvious, 8.5% blows 2% and 3% out of the water. If you're promoting games consoles and not going through Amazon, you're potentially missing out.

In fact, under Amazon's Performance Fee sliding scale, if you were selling 1600+ products a month, your default commission would be 7.5%, which would take you up to 10% for qualifying direct link clicks that generate the 2.5% premium.

With figures like that, is there any reason you would promote games consoles through anyone else?

Labels: affiliate marketing, amazon, games consoles

I often think of my approach to site building as being like kite flying. I throw up plenty up in the air and if any start flying, then they get my attention and I then dedicate more time to them. Others fall by the way side and never progress further than the time it took to create them in the first place.

One site which has recently started flying is a site called Toys and Video Games, which I mentioned back in April when I developed it and made use of Amazon's Web Services. It was designed to hook up with the toy inventory of Amazon in the US.

After that initial development phase, which did take a couple of days whilst I got my head round Amazons Web Services and how I was going to make use of it, I've done hardly any work on the site at all except for add in a Transformers toy page and put a link to back packs on the front page for the Back To School period.

But despite it being left to its own devices (which thanks to the live product info through Amazon's Web Services is quite a reasonable thing to do), it has started to generate some very decent sales. Individual toys - and quite popular ones at that - have somehow ranked well within Google and Yahoo! and I've occasionally been knocked sideways after logging into Amazon Associates and seeing how many items a particular toy has sold in the previous day.

Whilst doing online marketing, the prospect of having a .com site, hosted in the US, promoting US products to US customers has always appealed to me (because of the size of the market) and I'm pleased that that's what I've got. So the site has shown me its potential so I hope to develop more actual content for the site before Christmas.

Labels: amazon, progress, update

The Amazon Associates program updates its stats once a day. In the UK, that means new stats going live at 1am or shortly after. I can't remember the last night I didn't stay awake til 1am to see my stats. I have the page bookmarked on my phone and I'm seemingly unable to sleep until I checked my figures. It wouldn't be so bad but I make a paltry amount from it!

Now, I obviously have some compulsion which I need to tackle. I'm thinking of removing the Z from my keyboard since I don't useit much and at least I won't be able to access their site anymore. I always used to be happy to wait until the next morning cos I assumed the stats updated maybe about 7 am or something like that, until my friend checked by chance just after 1am and saw the new figures.

What can Amazon do to give me back my sleep?

It would be nice in this day and age if Amazon could offer live stats. Or failing that, who really needs their stats at 1am, just delay it to the start of the next working day and give weak people like me back their sleep!

[update]

Don't think it's worth starting a new post over, but I just noticed Amazon improved aStores! Previously you could select a top level category and then all you could do was enter keywords to return the products you wanted. So if I wanted to list Nintendo DS Games, I would choose computer and video games and then enter "DS" as a keyword. Only problem was that this would bring back accessories and all kinds of other stuff. Now you can choose your top level category and drill down to the right sub category, which is going to make for better aStores.

Labels: amazon, associates, sleep

I ordered an SD memory card from Amazon the other day, and the price was a very cheap £5.00. Great, I thought, so I ordered it but was suprised to see that the postage was another £5.00. Seemed excessive I thought, but at least it will come quickly and probably be sent by recorded post.

But no, that's not what happened.

The item took about a week to come and was simply in a plastic envelope with a first class stamp. They must have had made as much, or more, profit through their "postage" costs as they did through the price of the item itself. Of course, this kind of practice isn't new. You commonly see it on eBay where the fixed price of items can be artificially low but with the money recouped through high postage.

But what's the impact of this?

For Amazon, I think it diminishes their reputation. The fact that it's from a 3rd party is a subtlety which will be lost on many users and I expect them to believe they are simply getting it from Amazon, and that Amazon are using this strategy of artificially low prices. That's not good for Amazon.

For Amazon Associates (on the Performance model, which includes 3rd party sales), it's a raw deal because the commission earned is on the price of the item not for the shipping costs. So if the seller has artificially low prices, the affiliate is missing out on the commission from where the profit is really made - on the postage.

Basically, it sucks.

Labels: affiliate marketing, amazon

I've been planning for as long as I can remember to get my head round Amazon's API.
It was one of my new year's resolutions and I mentioned it again in a post last week.

David Fiske replied in the comments and assured me it was a doddle.

Turns out he was right!

After David's useful encouragement, I spent the latter part of last week getting into it. I had assumed it would be be a complicated development project so fired up my Visual Web Developer (which I save for what I consider *proper coding* tasks) and started off down that road.

Then with a little bit more reading, I discovered that the easier way to work with Amazon's Web Services was using XML over HTTP (known as REST). If you're not familiar with it, it basically means you construct a URL which points at Amazon's Web Services and the parameters in the query string allow you to return data you want which comes back in XML form.

You then need to work with the XML anyway you feel comfortable to display it on your page. I work in .net and the nested XML that was returned didn't bind too easily to .net controls like repeaters and datagrids etc, so I then had to go off on a tangent learning about XSLT which enabled me to control the layout of the XML returned and make it more suitable for how I wish to use it. Once I had "flattened" the XML results and only included info I required, I was able to simply bind them to .net controls.

I'm not entirely sure I went about things the best way, but managed to end up doing exactly what I wanted and getting the Amazon toy section listed on my new site, Toys And Videogames. It was actually really enjoyable to get my teeth into some new technologies and actually learn what feels like a new skill. I'll now be looking at adding Amazon Web Services to more sites so they can be live without me having to update them myself. In my researching, I didn't find any really useful sites that explained fully about this route I've taken, so look out for a walkthrough soon.

Labels: amazon, web services, xml, xslt

It was one of my new years resolutions to finally get to grips with Amazon's web services, and I've managed to put it off until now but it's looking increasingly like something I'm going to have to learn - here's why:

I had a toy site with a spammy type domain name that was highly listed on MSN.co.uk for the search term "toys". Unfortunately it was removed from MSN's listings shortly before last Christmas which was more than a tad disappointing.

So I resolved to come back with a stronger, toy related domain, which was more brandable and less spammy looking. The success I had with US links on my Wii Preorder site last year using Toys R Us and Walmart convinced me that I wanted a brand I could develop UK and US sites for. So I did some brainstorming and and came up with ToysAndVideoGames.com and ToysAndVideoGames.co.uk.

I've got a working UK site up and running with its first few sales coming through the door. I've used the product feed from Toys 'R' Us UK (via Affiliate Window) to build the site and imagined I would do something similar on the US site . But I hit a roadblock when I discovered that to use a "merchandiser" product feed from Linkshare, I'd need to cough up $250 first which I'm not prepared to do (you can get round this by having 50 sales in previous month but I don't have that). Also, I've seen the Toys R Us product feed and commission change (down to 3%) get thoroughly slated on the AbestWeb forum so have decided not to go ahead with that option.

So I now need to find an alternative and Amazon's toy section seems like the best way to go as far as I can tell, for sheer product range and brand recognition etc, although not being too familiar with the US market, I'd love to know if there's an alternative I should be considering. I've put an Amazon aStore up as a stop gap measure but really want to set about creating a large site which will have many indexable pages.

One piece of good news is that it turns out the .com was registered previously and the domain actually has an age of nearly 6 years, so I'm hoping that may help me avoid the sandbox and quickly build some quality rankings on Google.

The other tool apart from Amazon's API I will be using, and I think it's an essential resource for this project, is a "child". My nephew can give me great insights into what toys are hot and I'm still greatly impressed from the time he instantly spotted that a Pokemon Game Boy game I had bought at a boot sale was a fake.

Labels: amazon, new site

The Amazon Associate scheme is one of my favourite affiliate avenues, thanks mostly to its large product set, trustworthy brand and actually pretty decent commission rates. Obvious downside is the recent change to 24 hour cookies, but it remains a great program to be involved with.

One thing that frustrates me slightly is the stats that are available. Firstly, there's the wait. The long, agonising wait to see what sales you've got. And then when you get the stats, they're not spectacularly helpful in letting you know anything other what orders came through. You have no idea as to what clicks specifically generated what sales, which throws a fog of mystery over the whole thing as you try and determine what clicks converted best.

No doubt the seasoned pros have their own strategies for analysing their stats and learning all they can from them, but I recently came up with my own strategy for gleaning more information from Amazon's stats and thought I'd share it.

I wanted to work out what times of the day and days of the week were the best for converting clicks to sales, and wanted a way I could develop some kind of heatmap, showing me the hottest times for particular products. It may be that there was no conclusive patten but trying to understand, learn and ultimately predict purchaser behaviour is part of the fun.

So here's what I came up with. Amazon recently increased the number of tracking IDs you can have to 100. You can create new tracking IDs by creating a new aStore. I picked a random word and created 24 tracking ids, each with a number - starting at 00 - appended to the end, and incrementing by one.

e.g.
trackingID00
trackingID01
trackingID02
trackingID03
and so on

Each of the tracking IDs now represents an hour of the day.

I have created my own Amazon links that go through a local page on my server which runs a little bit of vb.net code to determine the hour of the day and then insert the corresponding tracking ID into the outgoing Amazon link. For example, at 2.30 om, the amazon link will be created using trackingID14. It's pretty simple and this bit of work on my side allows me to then from see the stats the 'hot' times of the day for the products I'm tracking and work out a decent plan for my PPC activities across the week.

Labels: amazon, tracking

The stats for Amazon.co.uk's Associate program are severely delayed today. Usually you can get updated stats from around 00:30 - 01:30 but no sign of any new numbers yet and it's 09:45.

OK, fair enough, this has happened before and it's not the end of the World and I'm sure it will be sorted later on. But then I remembered they had a fairly new blog and that would be a sensible place to put up any information about problems or delays.

So I head on over to http://affiliate-blog.amazon.co.uk/ to get the inside scoop on what's happening and not a dicky bird.

Note to Amazon: If you're going to run a blog worth reading, at least try and make it a half useful resource and put information on there that people really want to know from you.

Labels: amazon

My wireless internet site, myHotspots.co.uk, had been ticking over nicely for the last couple of years and doing quite well with Adsense and also reselling BT Openzone vouchers (which I'm still to be paid for, but that's another story). I had tried to increase revenue by adding links to various electrical retailers in the side bar, but to be honest, my users didn't show any interest.

So when Amazon recently increased the number of aStores you can create to 100, I thought I'd try a specific aStore dedicated to wireless internet products. I added it to the site menu as "Wifi Store" and since then I've seen a steady stream of wifi kit, such as routers, network adaptors and wifi finders, sold through the site.

So I'm pleased to be able to say, Amazon aStore seems to work very nicely indeed.

Labels: amazon, things that work

Just noticed on Amazon there there's a new book coming soon called "Affiliate Millions: Make a Fortune Using Search Marketing on Google and Beyond".

Here's the sypnosis: Google, Amazon.com, and eBay are among the best-known e-commerce Web sites. Millions of people around the world visit and use them every day. But the fact that individuals can generate income by placing affiliate ads for these and other sites is not well known. This book talks about this area.

I took a look at the publisher's site to see if it would be possible to a get a review copy, but it said not to bother unless you're a member of the bona fide press. Whatever that is.

The book's out in April so I guess I'll order it myself and see what it's like when it's out. Here's some affiliate links of my own in case you want to preorder it too!

Amazon.co.uk: Affiliate Millions
Amazon.com: Affiliate Millions

Labels: affiliate marketing, amazon, new book

I'm sure when Amazon launched its rather cool aStore feature, you could only have one aStore linked to your associate ID.

Just noticed you can now have 100 aStores per Associate ID.

Happy Days!

Labels: affiliate tools, amazon

I only just noticed that Amazon.co.uk was running a blog about its Associates program. Doesn't seem to have been running too long - first post was in November - and I only just spotted it in the side menu when logged in to Amazon.

Seems a useful read though, and worth keeping an eye on.

Amazon Associates Blog

Labels: amazon, blogs

Amazon are running a competition to see who can best integrate the aStore into their own website.

Associates can win from a total prize pool of £2750. The prizes are as follows:

• First place: £1000
• Second place: £750
• Third place: £500
• Special award: Best Christmas/Holiday-aStore: £500

Prizes will be awarded according to how creatively aStore features are used and how well the aStore is integrated in to the Associates’ site. The winners aStore should be integrated as seamlessly as possible into your overall website’s look and feel.

Log into your Amazon Associates account for more info and conditions.

Labels: amazon

Amazon have a cool new tool for their Associates (affiliates to you and me).

You can now create your own Amazon store in a feature called aStore - you'll see the link next time you login. Just fire up the wizard and in a couple of short, easy steps you can build your own branded affiliate store using the Amazon catalogue.

I have been meaning to get to grips with Amazon Web Services, and still will, but this seems to be a nice middle route between just displaying a banner and the fully fledged development required to set up web services based site using their API.

You can see the aStore I just created here.

Because this store is hosted with Amazon and you'll either need to just link to the URL or embed it into an IFRAME, it's not particularly useful for SEO purposes but I'm going to try it out and see how it goes. Have you set up an astore yet? Tell me what you think and share your URL in the comments box.

Labels: amazon