The Amazon Associates program have announced a new widget in the last day or two – it’s called the Carousel Widget. You can see one in action below with six blogging books.
Amazon.com Widgets
The unit above is a ‘carousel’ format (horizontal) but they also have a ‘ferris wheel’ format (vertical). Each come in different size options.
This looks a lot better than Google’s new rotating ads.
Wow!
It looks great. The animation is pretty nifty.
Their new widget looks great. If only I was doing advertising on my blog…. Heh. :)
I got their notice in my email but didn’t jump on it because I’ve had problems with their animated widgets causing my pages to load super super slow. I haven’t played around with them since then but the non-animated ones don’t give me any problem.
Whee! Do books get dizzy?
That looks great!
Amazon tools are awesome!
What a cool widget, I’ve had a product widget on my blog from an affiliate network before but this is much more appealing with the carousel feature. Thanks for the heads up Darren! I’m going to put this one to use tonight!
Looks cool, but is it really useful. I for one find it a bit annoying that I have to wait for the book to get around to the front. My 2 cents worth.
I like it! Think I use it on my new blogs.
i dont realy use my amazon associate since it does not giving me any revenue..very hard to make sales..
do you have tips for this? hurm..
maybe this new carousel can make difference?
I put up some of these new widgets today on a couple of my blogs. I think they look great. New ad types are always welcome. Hopefully people will be inclined to click on them seeing they are quite different. Time will tell…
Nifty! We’ll see if it generates more clicks.
Well, it looks nice. It also seems to take up a lot of space. The one problem I had with Amazon affiliate products is that they slow down page download. The times I’ve attempted to contact them, they never seem to respond with answers to questions. Not the greatest customer service, but that’s only my personal experience. Other people may love them.
That’s very fancy-schmancy, but I’m not sure that it’s a good thing.
I kind of get the impression that Google and Amazon are trying to throw so many ads on the page at once that maybe people are just ignoring them – that’s not good.
If more ad-items mean less attention-span, it’s going to translate to less clicks. I’m not sure I buy this new “multi-ad” philosophy yet.
Thats pretty cool :)
The idea is nice, but usability wise it’s horrible. There’s no reason you should have to hold the arrow down or repeatedly click. One click should automatically rotate to the next or previous book.
I love it! I’ll have to start doing some advertising!
Are you able to affect what’s in the rotation?
Or is it auto generated by Amazon? Hmmm.
Either way,
the added variety is helpful in marketing,
but the User Engagement could really increase sales.
I liked it. I enjoyed it. It’s pleasure to rotate it. I keep on doing it in a store. Of course, i stop to pick up the book and browse. Exciting!
This is very cool. I love how you can just plug it in. And keep it moving. That will be fun to add to blogs and websites. Thanks for the tip!
Best,
Mary
http://www.twitter.com/marygallgher
Very cool! They got some nice ideas there.
Hey….I can use the WordPress for dummies book!!
I got the same e-mail this morning and had the widget up by noon. The first time I saw the carousel on the Amazon site, I thought, man, I wish I could see that with products containing Stephen Colbert. So today, after I built it, I just watched the products go round and round. I even blogged about it here – http://www.nofactzone.net/?p=3493
Then again, there is the argument about valuable real estate on the blog and is it worth the space for a gimmick. Only time will tell. I haven’t gotten any sales out of it yet, but then again, most of the power users of my blog own the majority of these products.
I have to say this is one of the better-looking ad implementations I’ve seen in a while. I added a “ferris wheel” to my sidebar with some personal finance books. Remains to be seen if they convert better than the classic links.
gimmick! but does look nice in a blog post
This looks fantastic. It fits perfectly on my sci-fi oriented site :) :)
That looks pretty cool. I think I will give it a go.
I noticed that the arrow keys don’t bring the next book around automatically but it’s fun watching them spin.
I don’t think anyone looking at the products would mind that the arrow doesn’t work all that well yet. They are more interested in the products.
thanks
Amazon.com has always been a great deliverer of affiliate commissions for me. I’ll have to test out that particular widget; generally I stick with direct text URLs. Sometimes simple works best.
Data points,
Barbara
I don`t notice the arrow keys.
First,I use mouse pointer to click and drag,but they don`t move.Then,I have to find some button to click.
I like it. Looks exciting.
Lets say you wanted different ones under different posts, can you choose what it shows?
Firefox users with FlashBlock installed will not see the carousel. Regular images does show up for everyone.
Nifty Little Widget. Pretty slim too ;)
The widget messes up the layout of my wordpress page.
Film-Book you can redo the carousel and input the correct dimensions for your page. I had to customize mine for my blog. I use the slideshow widget to show my top book pick of the month. This month I added the carousel for more effect. I like when my blog opens the carousel moves. It’s a great attention getter. I’ve sold a few books already.
From European’s point of view biggest weakness in Amazon is that if you want to make real business with them on global scale, you would have to be associate/affiliate for each and everyone of those amazon shops and then you would have to code by yourself that if user comes from country xyz, show him/her ads from amazon.co.uk, if he comes from abc, show ads from amazon.com, if he comes from country def, show ads from amazon.de, …
We are trying used amazon associated,but is never success to the earnings. earnings is zero for one year.