Direct Amazon links vs AOM links

I have a well established books site that does fairly well with Amazon, selling several items a day through branded Amazon search and direct links to products.

I experimented with Associate O Matic a little bit but adding it to my site seemed to damage it in Google SERPs with the huge number of pages being added.

With AOM, there is a better commission value than with direct Amazon links, but my hunch is that people trust Amazon much more as a place to complete a purchase than they do a generic site using Amazon data.

Has anyone else experience of changing direct Amazon links to AOM links and did it improve or hurt sales?

Thanks

 

AOM's forte is getting niche, quality Amazon sites up quickly. I wouldn't use it to replace something you know is working well. But if you want to get into new niches with minimal effort, AOM is the way to go (IMHO).

I'm not aware of any difference in commision values between AOM and direct links.

In my experience, I've done far better with AOM than I ever did with direct Amazon links. But, as I said, I wouldn't replace something that's already working well.

 

Thanks Sagetips

I thought (and I might be wrong) that AOM gave a better commission rate because users would browse and add all items via your own site, which means each item would count as a direct link purchase. I believe Amazon give you less commission for each indirect item purchase (ie when the user clicks or searches away from the original landing page). Amazon have changed their comm structure so much that might not be true anymore

I think my existing Amazon links work well because it's a book site and everyone trusts Amazon. I just wish I could work out a formula for increasing sales - books are a really crappy thing to make commissions on ;-)

 

I think you have said it all here - an established site, added amazon script, damage it in Google SERP. This is something which I wouldn't do.

If you want, try to set up the script on it's own domain, add whatever you want to it, and see how it fares over a period of four to six months.

The least here is that you will have 2 sites to work with (and earn from)...

 

I wish I'd read that six months ago

I've managed to reverse most of the damage from AOM on the site, and have previously thought about what you said DinoDino re quick start up niche sites - the issue there though is getting traffic to the site if all your content is from Amazon and so going to end up in the Supplemental Index.

I guess one way to do it is add other content around the Amazon content through the page template, but that would quickly get messy. Perhaps a better way is linking through from an established site via blog posts etc. so that it sells purely on targetted traffic

Do you have any tips about promoting an AOM site and managing to differentiate it enough to rank on its own?

 

I do not have any experience with AOM, but I did use another Amazon script extensively though for a period of time.

I use to have up to 100 domains running the script for different product groups, niches and whatever you may think of - until of course BigDaddy came forth with the dup-content penalty.

I only keep a few each of these stores now, and a few of aStores as supplementary to my activities on the net.

A newly launched script site may get some good sales in the first couple of months. What I believe is that once BigG deepcrawls the site for a second time, and finds a lot of duplicates, it just sends all of them to supplemental...