I think what you need to do is to make it relevant to visitors. Having visitors is critical -- you can't sell without good quality traffic. It is also helpful to make a veiled suggestion "Try this Magazine/Book for help with your fish-tank hobby".
1. aStores are fairly new, there's plenty of it, and the way the forum goes, it might comes up as a search result if the keyword combination is specific to your store. 2. aStores should not be your only income revenue from Amazon, or at least it should not stand on its own (collecting dust), link to it from your other sites, talk about it in your blogs, promote it to friends (print a business card with the aStore address)... 3. Enhance your aStore pages with some unique content to differentiate it from others having the same content. Browse this forum and you'll find a lot more ideas...
I don't understand why people push Amazon so much, yes i'm an affiliate as well, but the single session 24 hour cookie is a joke. Now rumors about them raising the check fees... They don't value their affiliate much.
I just opened an aStore and think it's pretty cool and easy to set up. The link show on the site without the www. ie.http://______ but doesn't show up at the http://www.____ What can I do?
I had someone RETURN a $2800 Flat Screen TV the other day. Man that hurt! $-114.00 is not what I like to seen on my earnings. Funny thing is they had ordered a $500 extended waranty along with it and that hasn't shown up in the return column yet. Maybe they transfered it to another TV since it was bought through a third party.
cldnails, how many stores do you operate to generate $100 per day in sales? I completely agree that the secret is in the niches. Earlier this year I had a string of big ticket sales that were returned. It does hurt when someone returns a generator or a big screen TV. So far, no returns in the last half of the year. I find it hard to believe that anyone would return large or heavy items like these. I suspect that the real reason that Amazon is changing their commission structure from a quarterly payout to a monthly payout is so that they can deal with returns. As of January 1, the commission payout is based upon monthly sales, but the payout delay is now 60 days.
IF they would actually work on their customer service a little bit, I feel not as many returns would need be returned, eh? I ordered something from amazon.com and they didn't even give me the correct tracking number. How am I suppose to sell stuff for them if they don't even do things right for me eh?
Ouch! Just wondering whether this post will get rough. I am down and out probably for more than a week due to the Internet disruptions in Asia Pacific - earthquake off Taiwan damaged APC2 network. Any other DP members in the same boat?
I stopped promoting my aStore a few weeks ago, coz they were costing me money and brought me $0. When I came back a few days ago, to my surprise I saw 3 orders and earnings of $18.52. Confused, though happy. Amazon doesn't process real-time stats do they? Do they only wait for orders to be shipped then they award you with commissions?
Amazon only gives you a sub-domain to the domain they own. If you want a unique domain name, you have to go to a domain registry, find out if you name is available, and pay to register it. Then you will be required to pay an annual fee to keep it. These fees are really small, sometimes as low as a couple of dollars a year during special promotions. You can do this at a lot of places, like Yahoo, GoDaddy, and on and on. Go to Business/Domain Names on this forum and you should find some threads about various registries.
Yeah. You get comission on the day it is actually shipped. It is usually about two days. You will notice this if you actually purchase any items through amazon. They have a day or two hangtime and your order is in "pending" status where they are gathering the items for it.
Oh, and when you get your domain, you will have a chance to enter your a-store url as the place the domain links to, and you'll be set.
I get sales from a relative who is an Amazon addict. He lets orders pile up in his shopping basket, then pays for them. That's when they finally show up as orders. Then they ship in pieces over time. The thing with the shopping basket makes the statistics look weird, as they do the conversion percentage based on orders, but don't post the orders until the payment is made.
Thanks for your reply Stilloutthere, but that wasn't my problem. I already had the domain: www.samurai.sc and the shop link worked fine. The problem was when I typed in samurai.sc without the www the shop link wasn't there, but it seems to have resolved itself now and is showing fine.