Amazon aStores @ Amazon.com

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Amazon has expanded their aStore program to allow associates to create up to 100 aStores per account. Now you can cover up to 100 niche markets using most of Amazon's top-level and second-level category searches, listmania lists, and/or your own hand-selected items.

The only problem seems to be that Google's "thin-affiliate" rules seem to apply, so you will have to do some serious promotion to get any traffic to your stores.

My own approach has been to create "omnibus" stores using all the categories to zero in on popular niches:

The Whole Ed Catalog - Canada

The Whole Ed Catalog - United Kingdom

The Whole Ed Catalog - Deutschland
    Google translation to English

The Whole Ed Catalog - France
    Google translation to English

If you open multiple accounts using the same e-mail address, be aware of the undocumented "feature" that you MUST use a different password for each account. I've had a horrible time getting them all to work at once, with the French site being sadly underdeveloped at present.

The new aStores, like Squidoo, open the world of web-publishing to a larger number of participants and produce professional-looking standards-compliant sites with little effort.

Associates can "select all" products with a single click, or pick and choose products tailored for a specific market segment. (I've gone with a "youth market" niche ... but for how long?)

With only a relative handful of aStores online to date it's too soon to tell how the aStore program will affect Amazon's poor page-loading performance. (If Alexa gets stuck spinning it's wheels -- well, Amazon.com owns them, too.)

For the time being, at least, the aStores offer response times that regular Amazon customers will find astonishing.

See Another Year, Another Update below.

The store-builder only supports a subset of categories and subcategories (with NO third-level or deeper categories) and optionally a keyword. Given Amazon's bizarre search capabilities, this isn't going to be the answer to every marketer's prayers.

The new system appears not to be built upon Amazon's wierd Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. AWS responds to user requests by querying the Amazon servers, then returns the data it recieves to the AWS client, who ultimately relays it to the end-user.

By deploying this competing technology -- rather than upgrading their regular servers -- Amazon seems to be snatching the "short head" away from AWS users (like Squidoo) leaving them with only the "long tail."

Is Amazon.com backing away from the associate business model that helped to make them what they are today? I doubt it, since they have their own network of pay-per-sale ads at (an average of) 75 days net, and they can unilaterally set the commission rate. That would be hard to replace.

They are making it harder for associates to build links, though. The old "browse" and "feature" fields are gone, making it much more difficult to build category links even as they have eliminated the 2.5% bonus for direct-link sales. Furthermore, their change from Google-based site search to MSN Live has wrecked a lot of pre-defined search links, too.

I haven't turned green and burst out of my shirt, but I am a little peeved...

Amazon.com gets away with some pretty atrocious web design just because they are Amazon.com. Their customers are familiar wit their cluttered pages and can find what they want eventually.

Their aStores are being very well-recieved if our results are any indication. Many people prefer the cleaner look and faster load times. When more detail is required, they can always refer to the "old style" pages.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but it isn't necessary for everyone to prefer these pages. As long as some do we are happy to offer them their choice.

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