Amazon shops do they work?

[tresmom5]

I've been contemplating making an amazon shop for our site. Selling amazon products and making a shop. We have a growing content site and are starting to get decent traffic, but looking for other ways to earn revenue. Does this work? I don't want to waste my time.

Teresa

[jmcgready]

don't know about anyone else,
but I've got a site that's been
up (in one form or another) for about a month...

so far I've made @ $27.00 in referral $ -
more than I've ever made with CJ -
you might have an easier time of it than I,
since I'm driving traffic to it via AdWords
and you've got a site up already....

Amazon has a link to Amazon Product Feed
(aka Mr. Rat's script), which I use, along with
some mods from APFmods.com ...

I've heard that the holidays (which are soon upon us)
have higher conversion rates for links -
I'm averaging @ 2 - 2.5% conversion ratio right now -
some days goes up to 4%,...

don't know how much help that is,
but I hope it helps....

[edited by: rogerd at 2:23 pm (utc) on Nov. 4, 2004]
[edit reason] No specifics/URLs, please... [/edit]

[tresmom5]

That was very helpful. Thank you

Teresa

[Jesse_Smith]

Yes, they work, though now you have to do way more work than you would have had to do a year ago. Last year I made $16,215.73 from Amazon, and this year will probably be under $10,000.

[Lalo]

yes surely it will work. I started displaying products from Amazon two months back and getting some sell now.

[MrSpeed]

Yes, they work, though now you have to do way more work than you would have had to do a year ago.

In which way do you mean? Customizing the script to try to avoid duplicate content filters or more work to get inbound links, pagerank etc...

[Jesse_Smith]

Both! For example, if you use MrRats script, you got hundreds of other sites that have stores with the exact same content.

[hunderdown]

I have a niche content site, with links I build by hand--not using AWS or any script. I do very well if I review a book directly related to the content of my site, and persuade visitors that they need to have it. Some general purchasing too, but I estimate 80% of purchasese are books I recommend.

For a content site, Amazon can work nicely, and dovetails with AdSense, which I would also recommend if you don't have it yet. The difference is that AdSense (once you've settled on a format) needs minimal maintenance, but Amazon takes more work--reviewing new books, etc.

[BriGuy20]

I've been able to do direct PPC to Amazon (and PPC to store landing pages to Amazon) fairly successfully depending on the product. If you can sell products on the amazon site that you talk about on your content site, you should do fairly well.

[Jesse_Smith]

I once tried PPC, but didn't even make more than I spent. Then again I was promoting cheaper stuff like books and movies. Now with much better commissions, you could probably easily make money promoting high cost products that have no cap, like jewelry.

[rfung]

My newest site is an amazon product feed I started just about the beginning of this month(Nov) - so far G has indexed about 7k pages out of the 20k product pages I have, and it has netted me $20 in these first 5 days of operation. I figure once I have better page rank this site should give me a nice stream of adsense + amazon commission.

Of course, the (relative) success of this site is making it tempting for me to do more of these sites. (this one was my first attempt at an Amazon feed).

[instinct]

No 'sandbox effect' or 'google lag' with your new site rfung? Is it a new domain?

[rfung]

Well I bought it a few weeks(?)/a month back, then put up a default page and linked it from my other sites, just so G would recognize it. So for a while G had only this one page indexed saying 'test' or something like that. I've also heard that G has been agressively indexing sites too, so I probably got lucky to have my site up and running around this time.

I think for this site it is just a matter of the scale of things - with 7000 pages, I'm bound to be found by some random odd search...

I pale in comparison to other users here who have 100's of thousands of pages indexed.

[Jesse_Smith]

I stay out of the sandbox by linking to new sites on message board signitures and linking to them on existing sites allready indexed. 84 domains and it almost always works!

[MrSpeed]

Just wanted to let people know that this thread inspired me to create an Amazon Shop. I am using one of the scripts available on the web. I did use mod_rewrite and a few other tweaks to hopefully distinguish my site from the others that use the script. One the downside (maybe) it is an AWS3 script. I am going to modify it to use AWS4 when I have a chance.

I checked out some of the pages in the keyword density tool and things look pretty good. I did not do anything real crazy from the SEO standpoint.

I went live the 15th and linked to the new site from 2 or 3 pr4,pr5 sites. Googlebot has sniffed at the main page a lot but no deep crawl yet. MSNBot has been crawling heavily.

From what I have gathered from the various message boards at Amazon and script sites the people that seem to have success are doing it with multiple Amazon store sites. In some cases we are talking 40+ domains. Maybe people are creating seperate domains for each niche category, I don't know.

I'm curious to hear from others what they are making per store or per domain?

I just want to see what a reasonable goal might be for this one store I built. I'm pretty sure I will recoupe the $7 investment in the domain.