Rory Hansen

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Introduction to Amazon aStore 
As you’ve seen with DealDotCom, when new affiliate services come out, I generally give each of them an honest shot, to see how they work, as well as to gauge the return one might expect with minimal time investment into the service.

That was exactly the case when I set up a niche Amazon aStore a couple months back. At the time, I was already no stranger to Amazon’s affiliate programs; I had used their AWS services to add content to other websites I had setup, as well as hotlinked individual products from time to time. But as you probably know, Amazon aStore is a little different. In the most basic sense, it’s a personal online store that you can setup, where you list Amazon products to sell. You can leave this as a stand-alone website or embed this store into your existing website in an <iframe>. Then, each time someone visits your aStore and makes a purchase, you are rewarded with a small referral fee in the 5% to 7% range of the purchase cost.

Well, anyway, after choosing my niche and setting up my store, I did the #1 most important thing to drive visitors to the website: I linked to it from a couple of my other websites. I really only did that so that Google and the other search engines would have an easier time finding my site to index. Other than that, I did no SEO activities at all. Nor did I do any online advertising or marketing. I basically let the site sit.

My Amazon aStore results
Anyway, the first month passed and I made a whopping $0.75. One person had purchased one item from my site and that $0.75 was my take from the purchase.

But things seem to be totally different this month. We’re only 3 weeks into September and my affiliate income has already accumulated to nearly $13, based on purchases of over $225. Again, this is with No Advertising and No SEO!

Here’s a quick snapshot of the recent purchases that have come through my Amazon aStore:

You should be able to identify my niche market pretty easily from the product list above. ;-)

My impressions thus far 
Anyway, I’m rather pleased with the performance so far of my Amazon aStore. I really didn’t expect anything, and considering I didn’t invest much time at all, I think the site is doing rather well. I did a quick guess of some of the keywords that my visitors may be using to find my site, and in Google, my aStore has SERPSs of #1, #2, and a couple other high positions.

My only gripe so far is that I don’t think Amazon has any built-in web analytics for their aStores, so I cannot be sure to the means at which visitors are come to my store. On top of that, there doesn’t seem to be any way to embed third-party web statistics either.

Stay tuned for a month-end summary.