There are a number of ways to buld your own Amazon store using Amazon's datafeeds, including
Associate-O-Matic, GoldenCAN, and Magnik Amazon E-Commerce Service.

Associate-O-Matic is highly rated but the full version costs $99 for 1st year and $20 a year thereafter. GoldenCAN is free, but for the Amazon datafeed, you share 25% of traffic.

Magnik is also free, but there's no sharing of traffic, so you get to keep all commission on Amazon sales. I decided to give Magnik a try after looking at the demo store and reading some of the comments, both positive and negative.

I'm happy to say that since installing Magnik and setting up a couple of Amazon stores, I'm very impressed with the script - see my first efforts here:

• Wildlife & Birding Binoculars


• Hiking & Camping Store.


• Wildlife Cameras


• Computers & Accessoires

It's not my intention to review Magnik in detail, but rather to record the steps I took to install the script and set up a store, particularly as Magnik offers limited documentation.

It's assumed you should know that a MySQL database is necessary, so there are no instructions on how to do this.

For this example, I am using Bluehost as my hosting provider, although I have set up my Hiking & Camping store on Hostgator with no problems.

Before you start using the datafeed, you'll need an Amazon Associate ID, which you get when you sign up for Amazon's Associate Program. You'll also need an Access Key ID from Amazon, which you can get by signing up for AWS (Amazon Web Services) at http://aws.amazon.com.

Okay, here are the steps I took:

1. Downloaded Magnik from the Magnik website to a folder on my hard-drive
and unzipped the file. This creates a folder called "magnik" within which are two sub-folders, called "app" and "cake", and three files, ".htacess". "index.php", and "settings.php", plus a text file called "install.txt" which provides basic install instructions.

2. Using FileZilla as my FTP program, I created a new directory called "cameras" within the public_html directory on the server. I uploaded the two folders "app" and "cake", plus the three files - ".htaccess", "index.php" and "settings.php" to the "cameras" directory - see screenshot:



3. In cPanel of Bluehost I then created a MySQL database using the MySQL wizard. It's important here to make a note of:

a) the database name you select

b) the username you select

c) the password you select

If your host's cPanel doesn't offer a wizard for creating a database, it's still fairly straightfoward - see your host's tutorials.

In most cases your database name and username will have the username provided by your host in front of it. So if your hosting username is "jonadam", and you named your database "amazon" with "myshop" as a username, then the full database name will be "jonadam_amazon", while the username for the database will be "jonadam_myshop".

Below are screenshots showing the sequence of creating the DB using Bluehost's MySQL wizard:

i) Here I give the New Database the name "photo"



ii) Next step is to provide a username - "andrew" - and a password. Notice at the top of the screen it says "added the database ajmacask_photo". So my hosting username, "ajmacask", has already been added to the DB name, "photo".



iii) In this step the user and DB are joined - ie user "ajmacask_andrew" is added to the database "ajmacask_photo". You can also select what priveleges the user is allowed. I leave it with All Priveleges checked.



iv) The final step confirms the user has been added and completes the DB creation.



4. Now it's time to edit the "settings.php" file. What I did was to rename my "settings.php" file to "settings_original.php" on my hard-drive to ensure I keep a copy of the original. I then opened this in Notepad, made the changes and saved it back to its given name, "settings.php". (Note: when "saving as", select "all files" for file type, otherwise Notepad will save the file as a .txt file). See screenshot below:



5. The settings to be edited are shown below:

1. 'awsaki' - replace this with your Amazon Access Key ID


2. 'amazon ID' - replace with your Amazon Associates ID


3. 'login' - replace with you database username - in my case 'ajmacask_andrew'


4. 'password' - replace with your database password, exactly, ie nothing in front of it.


5. 'db_name' - replace with your db name, in my case 'ajmacask_photo'


6. 'localhost' - for most hosting accounts, this is correct and does not have to be edited.


7. 'admin' - this is the username for logging into Magnik admin section - leave as is or change to whatever you want


8. 'pass' - this is the password for logging into Magnik admin section - you should insert a new password here

Once I made the changes, I saved the file as "settings.php" as outlined above and uploaded to the server.

6. You now need to set permissions to 777 for the folder "tmp" and its subfolders. "tmp" can be found in the "app" folder. See below where permissions have been changed to 777 for the "tmp" folder. I then did the same for sub-folders within "tmp", viz "cache", "logs", "sessions" and "tests".



7. At this stage you're ready to access the Magnik admin area for your site and start adding Amazon categories and products. In your browser, type in the URL for your store, eg: www.mysite/admin if you added Magnik to the public_html directory, or www.mysite/directoryname/admin if you created a separate directory.

8. This should now open the Magnik admin area, which looks similar to the Magnik website - see below (note in this screenshot I've already taken the first step of adding "hiking & camping" products to my hiking store):


* * * * *

9. From here you need to work closely with Amazon's site as you manage your categories. I sometimes found it a problem locating the correct "Node ID" for products.

For the Hiking store, I went into Amazon and selected the Camping & Hiking category from Sports & Outdoors. I then copied the URL from my browser into Notepad and found node=3400371 within the URL. I entered that number as the Node ID, gave it my own title, "Hiking & Camping Gear" and saved.

I then clicked on the "View Subs" link and clicked "Regenerate this level" which brought up all the sub-categories with their IDs. (See below). Note: You can click on "Regenerate, including all subcategories", which will create a hierarchy of all categories and sub-categories for Hiking & Camping. If you don't want to include them all, you can go through each level and delete as necessary. I opted for the slower route, regenerating level by level, because I wanted to see what sub-categories would be created for each level.



10. Going the level-by-level route, for each sub-category you can again click on "View Subs", then click "Regenerate this level" to see what's in that sub-cat.

In the screenshot below, I've selected Hiking Apparel and regenerated this level to show the sub-cats. Notice how the right navigation column now bolds "Hiking Apparel" and adds links to the sub-cats.



In the next screenshot, I've gone a level deeper, selecting "Men's Hiking Apparel" and regenerated.



Here's a final screenshot of the Hiking Basics store, showing "Men's Hiking Apparel".



For this store I've made minimal changes to the default template. I'm not going to go into detail of how to change the look of the site. I can code basic HTML and CSS but my knowledge of php is zero so customising my stores is still hit and miss. For anyone skilled in php and CSS, it'll be a breeze customising a site.

See Magnik Walk Through for more