Geolocation with Amazon Associates?

Possible to vary ads by country of visitor?

[UserFriendly]

Is it possible to get Amazon Associates ads that vary according to the country of the visitor to a page?

I see little point in showing amazon.com ads to someone in the UK, because there's so little that Amazon will ship trans-Atlantic. And there's no point in showing amazon.co.uk ads to people in North America, because we're charged about 50% more for electrical goods.

So I'm trying to work out how to add affiliate links that take the visitor's country into account, without trying to code geolocation myself. Can Amazon's scheme do this for me?

(I am already using AdSense, but some pages just suck bad for contextual text ads.)

[hunderdown]

You might check what's available through Amazon Web Services, but I doubt that anything Amazon provides would handle this. They keep the various Amazons separate.

Maybe a third-party script?

[UserFriendly]

Yeah, I'm starting to think it's not a simple setup.

Any recommendations for global-friendly affiliate schemes that may work on pages where AdSense does not?

[jomaxx]

There are a couple of services that can provide you with the tools to do this yourself, e.g. GeoIP. You'd have to sign up with the individual amazon programs separately.

FWIW, it seems to be the exact same situation with eBay, who have a bunch of different country-specific affiliate programs.

[alexorig]

This is a really interesting question and one I have been thinking about a lot lately. How would you like to see this done? I can think of 3 possible solves:

1. An api like hostip offer where you send an IP address to the api and get back a country for the user. This would allow a lot of flexibility to the affiliate but a fair bit of experience to know how to code with it. If offered with REST (XML/JSON) though it could even be used in AJAX.

2. Some form of dynamic plugin script or include, which is hosted on a third party server, and would serve up content you have uploaded to that third party's server based on the geolocation of the user visiting the page - (PHP/JavaScript includes... would other programming languages be useful)

3. A totally simple solution where amazon/ebay/whoever geotarget everything banner/tool/javascript link that is served by them. I query this a little since text links by these programs (esp. those which allow affiliates to point to any page on their sites) have always been crucial when I work with affiliate programs. How would you feel if a program geo-targetted after the click?

It'd be interesting to hear what anyone here thinks about these solutions (if I have posted them in an understandable manner) and if you have any better ideas! I do think this is a big advantage for adsense etc... since they already geotarget the ads.

[UserFriendly]

Option 3 would suit me best. It's the way AdSense works, and I'm happy with AdSense in general.

Option 1 is probably what I'll have to look into for the pages where AdSense doesn't press people's buttons. The problem is that I'm on a shared hosting server, so converting all of my otherwise-static pages into dynamically-served pages will possibly get frowns from my hosting provider.

Option 2 makes me slightly nervous.