Hi there! My first post at DP, prompted by the very helpful tone of the discussion in another topic. It so seldom that one sees such helpful responses that I figured this was a good place to hang out. I work for a non-profit museum that is registered with Amazon as an Associate program member for selling Amazon merchandise and as a Pro Seller for purposes of selling back issues of our own museum quarterly "magazine". We ship the magazines directly to purchasers. I'm trying to create a "web store" for our web site which will feature both kinds of merchandise in a way that the buyer doesn't have to care where the goods are coming from or who is shipping them. My research so far has shown that Amazon's aStore and "Amazon Store" don't work for this mix. Associate-O-Matic looks like it will do exactly what I want. What I'm wondering is whether AOM is the best tool for this or if there are other ones that I should consider. What makes a particular tool best suited for this over others? Are there any pitfalls in AOM that I need to be watching for? If AOM is really the best tool for this, I could use some help on just getting started. I feel like I don't have an overall sense of what I'll need to do and where to get started. Thanks in advance for your assistance.
aom is a good option, but there are other good alternatives. I'm a little bias, but I'd recommend taking a look at EcommerceForEveryone.com before you make your final decision. Using that service, you can make a very professional looking site like the following two examples: Mac and PC store or Coffee Drinkers Heaven for only $10/mo (which easily comes out to free once you earn your first $10/mo). Those two sites are using the default themes, but you can make your own, or have a custom one made for you, so that it's branded to your company's taste. I hope this response and recommendation was helpful to you. thank you, PuReWebDev
There are several good scripts that you could integrate with your museums OWN web site, using the hosting you all ready pay for. Non of them are too hard to set up (and their user base will help you via their forums if need be) and they all allow you to change the way they look. As long as the items have an "amazon asin number" you should be able to use any of the below. I won't recommend any over the other as i do not sell them and thus have no bias Associate-O-Matic from http://www.associate-o-matic.com AffiliateBang from http://www.affiliatebang.com/ Associate Engine from http://www.c3scripts.com/ WAHA from http://www.wahacms.com/ ReviewAZON that is a wordpress plug-in from http://reviewazon.com/ etc I am sure others will be able to list others as well.
Thanks to both of you for the replies. I had not heard of ECommerceforEveryone before and it looks interesting (I don't have a problem with such recommendations when they are on-topic and the association of the poster is clear). My goal is to have something that resides on the web site we are already paying for. We don't do WordPress at all and many of the tools seem geared to folks who want to sell through a blog so I don't see them as being applicable, but I'm still reviewing. The thing that I find intimidating about AOM is that the developer seems to think everything is so simple that there is no need to provide a road map for how to get started. Yes, there's a control panel with lots of options that can be customized, but there's no real guide for how to create a page that is going to look like it belongs in my site. From what I've seen of E4E it looks a little more promising on that front because of the templates that are available for customizing. This may not be the answer, but at least the E4E site makes it clear that this tool is available as one road for getting where I want to go.
If you want to integrate it within your current website, it would help to know how your website is built at the moment. Is it hand coded html, php, asp, etc or does it use one of the content management systems such as Drupal etc? How do you currently add pages? Is your web server Linux based or windows? How many different products do you intend to sell ? If it is not a very big number of products then it may be easier to just add them to your normal site same as you would add any other content and use Amazon's "Product Previews" script to show price details etc. Customizing templates depends on how your main site is built, but is usually a case of breaking down your current page into a header area, navigation and footer area etc, and using those parts within the template of the script you choose. Templates can be very intimidating at first, but they do depend so much on how your main site is put together, and without seeing it, or knowing more about it, it is hard to advise, but nearly all of the amazon scripts available use templates that you can change, otherwise they would not be any good.