AlphaPetCenter.com Pet Supplies is For Sale – PR2 – 31,000 indexed pages

This is a 72 hour (3 day) auction for an established site and the domain name.

AlphaPetCenter.com


AlphaPetCenter.com is a USA Amazon affiliate site that has been up since September of 2005, but has not been promoted for more than a year. I find that I do not have the time to build traffic and promote several of my sites due to the workload with other projects and priorities. The site has good potential for someone who wishes to promote it with AdWords or Yahoo advertising.

The site is built on the most current version of the Freekrai Amazon Store Manager 2 (ASM2) script, but it has been heavily modified and greatly improved over the original. There are no licensing issues with the script.

Features:

* Great Domain Name!
* Site is automated. All product data and pricing comes direct from Amazon. There isn’t very much maintenance unless you want to alter the site.
* Set up for products from Amazon USA. It is possible to customize the script for other Amazon locations, but I have never done this.
* Home Page Top Sellers can be automatically updated every day or every hour. A custom script was added that can be run manually or via cron job that pulls in a list of Amazon’s Top Sellers. Amazon updates the top 10 sellers for each browse node every hour. The home page is set up to display the top 9 best sellers every time the custom script is run. The data is written to a text file and an e-mail is sent with a list of the current Top Sellers. The e-mail verifies that the script ran properly. Sample E-mail . The site is currently set up to pull in Top Sellers for the top level Pet Supplies browse node.
* Custom HTML title tag, description and keywords meta tags Each HTML title tag and description meta tag is unique.
* Client-side code has been modified so that site is not similar to other Amazon affiliate sites built with the original ASM2 script.
* Does not require a database.
* Menu selections can be set up using either a browse node or a keyword search. Keyword search menu selections typically produce a very unique set of results.
* Search box is set to search for all related Amazon products.
* Site can be used to push both Amazon products and AdSense.
* Pretty much a maintenance-free script.
* Very indexable script.
* Script has several other customizable features that I will explain to the buyer.

The script uses PHP and REST (REST is used by 80% of Amazon’s affiliates) to pull live data from Amazon’s affiliate server. It does not use a database. If you are a PHP programmer, this is one of the easiest Amazon scripts to modify.

Domain name registered at GoDaddy until 6/20/2008. Free push to a GoDaddy account.


AlphaPetCenter.com needs some promotional attention to make it successful.

As of January 4, 2007

Google PageRank = 2
31,800 pages in Google
0 backlinks showing in Google

1 page in MSN (see explanation below)
4 backlinks in MSN

4,168 pages in Yahoo
85 backlinks in Yahoo


The site was recently submitted to about 25 directories, so PageRank should build.

The October Amazon bug: Normally, Amazon’s pet products are found in the Pet Supplies product group. In October 2006, all child browse nodes for Pet Supplies began displaying the same set of products due to an Amazon bug. Amazon did not respond to numerous messages about the problem, which resulted in duplicate content penalties (each Pet Supplies category page displayed identical results), which dropped the number of indexed pages indexed in both Google and MSN to zero. I discovered that Pet Supplies could also be found under the Kitchen product group and this product group does display the browse nodes properly. The site was changed and the problem resolved. The site has recovered in Google, but not yet in MSN. MSN should recover in the next few months. Yahoo seemed unaffected by the problem. This was the only time I ever saw an Amazon bug like this, so it is unusual.


Starting Price: $100

No Reserve Price

BIN: $250

Auction Duration: 48 hours


Traffic Stats:

Averaging about 8,000 visits per month without any promotion. It looks like there is a lot of spider activity.

Here is the Webalizer data for the past several months.

Webalizer Overview


Revenue:

Revenue for the year is uncertain. I have several Amazon stores (this is the only Amazon pet supplies store) and I have sold quite a number of pet supply products. For most of this year, the commissions are mixed with other sites, so I cannot tell for certain which sales came from this site. Here is the commission report for the last quarter: commission report .

I wasn’t tracking individual site sales for most of my Amazon sites until late August and early September. In October through December, 20 items were shipped with a commission of $15.15. Remember that there was no site promotion at all and during this time and the site was messed up due to the Amazon bug I mentioned above. The potential for this site is much higher.

I believe the AdSense revenue was negligible, due to the currently subtle ad positioning. The goal for most of my Amazon sites is to sell Amazon products. There is one ad at the top of the browse pages and one on each product pages. Larger ads or better ad positioning would likely result in better AdSense revenue.

The site really needs some promotional attention. A lot of people are still not aware that Amazon sells pet products.


Requires:

Unix or Linux server running Apache and PHP 4.2 or newer. Your server needs to be able to make external calls to the Amazon server. Most servers do allow this, but some of the free and bargain hosting arrangements do not. You may have problems at hosting companies like DreamHost that restrict services and do not allow overrides in the .htaccess file. Your hosting company must allow you to use the .htaccess file. Instructions for the setup are included. It is pretty simple. If you are a complete newbie with Amazon, I can provide assistance to get you going.

You will need an Amazon Associates ID and an Amazon Subscription ID or AWS Access Key. The Associates ID is used for tracking sales. The Subscription ID or AWS Access Key is a developer ID that allows you to access Amazon’s servers.


Terms:

Payment by PayPal

Free domain name push to a GoDaddy account.

Two images on the home page are royalty free images from iStockPhoto.com. You must either license the images from iStockPhoto.com or remove them. The licensing cost is about $2 per image. If you wish to license the images, the iStockPhoto.com image file names are included with the installation and setup instructions.

This site is being sold as-is with no guarantees for traffic, revenue, rank positions, future PageRank, etc. I will be glad to answer any questions and help the buyer get it set up.

Please do not send me a PM inquiring about copies of this script. This auction is for a unique site.

 

Request received to lower starting price. Okay.

New starting price is $75.

 

Will you install it on my server?
If so, $75 bid from me

 

A) Did you have any Google revenue since Sept 2005? Please supply proof!

B) Can one screen out products that come up with pricing as N/A?

C) What is total revenue over the period that you have owned the site?

D) Using the search box at the top! On searching for Iams dog food - shows mirrors/backdraft movie - but when searching in "dog food" of the right side - Iams shows in the products? Any comment?

E) Can one reduce the number of pages shown from a search?

Please advise!

Dunc

 

My bid: $125

 

Thanks for the bid. Currently at $125.

Dunc, to answer your questions.

A. Google revenue is mixed with other sites. Assume it was low. The goal with this site was not to make money from AdSense. I think the small AdSense ads were added some time last summer. If you wish to drive AdSense revenue, the ads should be much more pronounced (as in larger and obvious).

B. I have no control over what is in the XML data that Amazon delivers. Products sold and shipped by Amazon normally display correct pricing, availability, etc. Pricing issues, availability and other inconsistencies are usually related to 3rd party items displayed on Amazon, but shipped by a 3rd party merchant. Almost anyone can sell products on Amazon if you pay them a 15% commission. Amazon does not always do a good job of making sure that the 3rd party merchants are maintaining their data correctly. When I find a browse node that displays all N/A items or does not display pricing, I usually just eliminate that browse node to avoid user confusion. Just because it says N/A doesn't mean that the product is not available. Sometimes when you click on the Buy button on the product page, you find that the product is available at Amazon, but the merchant is not maintaining their product data correctly. Personally, I think Amazon should never send product info for products that are not available, but they do. Part of the idea is to just get people into the Amazon site. People frequently add items to their order once they get into the Amazon site. Commission has always been paid on all items that users add to their Amazon shopping cart.

C. Because the unit sales and commission revenue is mixed with my other sites for most of the year, there is no way for me to tell which sites sold which products. Before I started selling some of the sites last May, I was running about 10 Amazon sites.

D. The search is set up as a "Blended" search. That means that when you search for a product, you are searching all Amazon products. This tends to generate sales for a wider range of products. The sales history for this site shows that most sales have been for pet products. A DVD site that I have frequently shows sales for power tools, books, video games, toys and a wide range of products. The search can be changed to focus on a product group, but doing so may limit your sales potential.

E. The number of pages returned can probably be limited in the code. It should be possible, but I have not tried it. You cannot control the number of items that get returned in a browse (category page) request. Generally, Amazon returns 10 items, but I've seen them sometimes return more when you do a search.

Hope that answers the questions. I will be periodically checking for bids and questions throughout the weekend. Just post your questions and I will answer them as soon as I see them.


BTW, if someone needs help setting up the site and will give me temporary FTP access to their server, I can set up the site. Detailed instructions are included. I sold a few sites to newbies that did not have problems following my instructions and were able to do it themselves. As long as your hosting company allows external calls to Amazon's server, setting this up is pretty simple. No database issues to deal with.

 

Current high bid is $130 via PM.

 

Please post your questions in the thread rather than via PM. It's easier to provide answers that everyone can see.

 

6 hours to go. Highest bid is still $130.

 

Only 30 minutes remaining to bid. Please post your final bids in this thread.

 

Looks like the site went for $130. PM sent to buyer.

 

If the site doesn't sell, I'm interested - contact me asap

Adi.

 

$150 here. Please let me know.