Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Amidst the speculation about the Amazon Unbox video download service, Amazon has quietly launched aStores, a service providing custom online storefronts for Amazon affiliates. (You may not be able to view the link unless you’re an Amazon affiliate.)

aStore by Amazon is a new Associates product that gives you the power to create a professional online store, in minutes and without the need for programming skills, that can be embedded within or linked to from your website.

Here’s a link to their demo store.

You get to pick up to nine “featured items” to put on the home page of the store, choose product categories, and add reviews and editorial content. The shopping cart and fulfillment are handled by Amazon, with standard referral fees going back to the affiliate. There’s a browser based interface for building a store on the Amazon Affiliates site. The resulting store can be hosted by Amazon or on your own site.

This sort of functionality has been available for a while for those will and able to customize their site using Amazon’s web services API, but the aStores program will make custom stores broadly accessible to all of the Amazon affiliates base (just in time for the holiday shopping season). I suspect we’ll see an explosion of niche shopping sites in short order, it looks pretty easy to set one up.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 20th, 2006 at 8:48 am and is filed under Business, Blogging, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.