Hi, I want to promote some products on my website for all countries. Is it enough to use the amazon.com affiliate links? Can people in the UK buy from it or do I have to make a section just for UK citizens and put amazon.co.uk links in it? thanks alot
Amazon has no way to really check the citizenship of the person ordering I know what you mean though - the deal is simple, anyone can order from Amazon.com, provided the item is deliverable abroad (Electronics are NOT for example). I am British and have bought books from Amazon.com (i.e. the US) since it was actually cheaper than co.uk! I could buy from Australia or Japan for that matter, but it's probably not cost effective! However, as regards affiliate links, if you want UK people to buy from co.uk through your affiliate links (you do, in the long run. they are far more likely to buy from the UK site), you have to put up UK affiliate links. The affiliate schemes are essentially totally separate and you will NOT get credited if someone reaches Amazon.co.uk and buys, having clicked on a .com link of yours. So in my opinion, and experience, you certainly need to have a separate UK section - you can't rely on the customer to figure out which link to click on - the less thinking they have to do, the better! In fact, my advice would be, have a separate site. Look at my script at http://www.storeminator.com - it is based on US Amazon, and once I had established it, I set up http://uk.storeminator.com using exactly the same script, just with some minor coding changes. Far simpler and less confusing, and more likely to bring you sales. However, since you are probably adding Amazon products to an existing site, then probably a separate section is the best bet. The third solution would be to get some geotargetting code, which would detect the users' location and serve them UK, US, CA, AU or whatever links - but that might not be practical on your site...
I just put my links like this at places on the page where it's required. Amazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon France | Amazon De | Amazon Japan | Amazon Canada I've seen others put US | CA | UK | DE | FR It actually works and people click correctly. I've 30% non-US sales each month. Geotargeting with programming code might be more elegant.