Dear DP members, I built a amazon discount finder tool , anyone please give a try and give me some advices. Appreciate your help! [tophotdeal.com/search-discount-coupons/] Regards, Grissom
Hi, seems like a neat little script. I guess you are using AWS and calculating the difference between the full price and the "special" price. Seems to work, but maybe it's not so clear to the average user what they have to do and why it is useful. Probably some kind of promotional "blurb" is needed to really push what you want them to do and why. Also, maybe you could pull out actual products to display on the search page - it's not very visual at the moment, maybe you could have a list of top discounted items, or something, with the small images and everything, so even if visitors don't understand what they are supposed to do with the search they will see discounted products that they can click on. That gives you some content, too, because otherwise I am not sure how you get traffic to your site. A toolbar or something would be cool! Good luck!
Thanks markowe. Actually I tried use PPC to attract visitors to come to that page and use my tool to search deals. But it looks that conversion rate is low. Any idea? Thanks.
Your instructions make it a lot more usable. That's a great idea - if you can promote it you'll probably make some decent $$$ from Amazon. Ben
Cool! You could have the same search bar at the top as well - just so the visitor doesn't have to read the whole page if they don't want to. Also, you have that screenshot of Amazon about halfway down - it's a little confusing, it is more eye-catching than the actual search-box, and I think users will click on it thinking THAT is the search. Maybe that graphic could be shown with reduced opacity, and maybe YOUR search form needs stronger styling. Hey, don't listen to me, I am no designer, but that is my first impression. Hope it works out anyway. I guess a future step would be to show those Amazon results on YOUR page rather than redirecting straight to Amazon. That way you will start getting the benefits of the search engines. With just one page you're going to have to rely on direct marketing, repeat visitors or some VERY good keywords!
Ciscopower, your script is so cool I think it's very useful for customer who wants to find great bargain. Is it hard to use AWS? What skills do you have to master to use it? I've tried to sign up but I don't understand a thing ^^;;
You need some basic knowledge of PHP, or another web programming language - if have that it can actually be very simple to use AWS. All you have to do is make a call to the server with your variables and it sends you back search/browse whatever results in XML format, which are easy to parse now in PHP. The limit is your creativity and imagination really.
Great idea and tool, and the page does look attractive. Good job! My one suggestion is that instead of calling it "the tool" on your webpage, why not refer to it as "the Discount Finder". It sounds more friendly to the common user that way and will also be better for SE. So for example you could have "Why Should I Use the Discount Finder?" instead of why should I use this tool? etc
Good suggestion - this is a common thing with programmers (I do it too - though I'm not much of a programmer!), they often write the user interface as though the user were also a programmer. Always think of the user coming to the site - they don't know and don't care about the workings so you can call things whatever will be most friendly and understandable to the user.
einsteinsboi: Thanks for your suggestion, I will change the page according to your idea. markowe: Thank you so much. As I added the instructions, I found that the conversion rate improved. The latest news: approximate 5$ I can earned each day. Not too much, but it is a good start. Next steps: Maybe I need to consider to make the page looks more offical and put some products in the top of page.
To markowe: I read your advice about my page again. I think you are absolutely right. Putting the results in my page can attract more visitors stay in site. Will try it in this weekend! Thanks a million! To naochan: AWS is not difficult, but you need to spend some time. But when you understand one thing, all of the others are clear.
Awesome - I would be happy even with $5 through Amazon! And if the dollar was a bit stronger...! Maybe I should go and put some effort into my sites instead of just giving suggestions to other people
Just luck, but I will continue to work on it. Anyway, I found amazon offers some products at very crazy price, such as $3.95 4G SD Card.
According to suggestions from some of you, I updated the page again. * Put another search form in the top of the page and add some product list near the search form. * Change the title color to blue, and change a simple logo for easy remembering. Any other suggestion?
Update: change the logo, add some products to top of page. Traffic: Come from Google. 1% From refer site: 60% From exchange link: 39%
It's coming along really well! I don't want to worry you with one thing, but a while back Amazon cracked down on "coupon sites" - they didn't like people sending traffic that consisted just of people buying discounted items. I hope that won't be a problem with this site - maybe someone else can clarify this a bit more because I am not entirely sure about this.