Put most simply – this is a way to add a shop to your blog (similar to Chitika’s shoplinc – the main difference being that Shoplincs are CPC (cost per click – you get paid if someone clicks) and aStores are CPA (cost per action – you get paid if someone buys something) The payment amounts and methods are the same as normal for Amazon associates.
The other difference is that you can host shoplinc’s on your own domain and aStores are on Amazon’s.
Here’s one I quickly set up a few minutes ago as a ProBlogger bookstore. It took me three minutes to make (I’ll need to customize it so don’t be too harsh) so it’s obviously a very quick and easy set up. There are options for different templates and customizations as well as the ability to include virtually any product in Amazon’s database.
There’s the ability to add different categories and pages to your blog and a variety of widgets that you can add to make it more your own.
First Impressions
My first impression is that it’s pretty good. Very simple to set up, nice to look at, easy to navigate and not too hard to integrate into the rest of your blog in terms of how it looks.
It’d be great to be able to run it on your own domain name (I haven’t seen any ability to do this mentioned) and to have even more control over the look of your page (as I’m sure once everyone has one that they’ll look a little common.
Also I’d love to be able to have multiple aStores per affiliate account so that those of us with multiple sites could have multiple aStores.
Lastly I’d love to be able to choose products in categories and sub category pages. While you do have some control over this by picking keywords there’s no way of selecting specific products on these pages like you can on your front/featured page. This means you could be seen to be recommending products that you might not want to promote.
I suspect it’s early days for aStore. Hopefully they’ll continue to develop it. It is only in beta so I guess it’s not too bad for a start from Amazon.
