Hello, I'd like to share some feedback. After reading a bit on the forums, I spent a couple of days developing a RubyOnRails application which is a kind of niche store. You can see it here: http://www.the-lighting-shop.com Google indexed the whole thing properly and I started getting some traffic (roughly 10 to 20 visitors a day). During the first 15 days (was in May) I made 5 sales, I was pretty happy. Then the traffic went down quite suddenly (a SEO guy I work with told me it may be a kind of "freshness effect"), I only get a couple of visits a day now. I made another 2 sales in July despite this, and nothing in August. Voilà , I did earn roughly 14$ dollars this way so far, I'm very happy with what I've learn down the road, although I'd like to get more traffic! If anyone now has suggestions (on this site itself, on link exchanges or growing traffic), I'm all hears!
Nice little script. "A few days", eh? I've been tinkering with my PHP-based Amazon script for months now The main problem is that there are a lot of other sites out there using Amazon scripts, so the content is getting duplicated big-time. Try a search for a random sentence off your site like ""Two SUPER LED's as bright as six regular LED's and never need replacing" in Google. I get 19 results, and I bet that is as much as Google can be bothered to index. Sometimes you can find hundreds, even thousands of sites with the same product description on. So that's why people starting out with Amazon scripts see poor traffic - at least it's one of the reasons, maybe someone can point out some other causes. In fact I am sometimes surprised my Amazon site (using Mr. Rat's script) gets any traffic or sales at all!
Thanks for your feedback! I guess yes, the content replication is killing us here. I thought about adding a blog with home-baked content (like a page describing a specific brand, for instance) to make a difference, but I'm not sure it will work a lot. Another idea I have is to start a website that will be more useful to people, and add a bit of affiliate marketting on the side. That's a bit more work, but also maybe more creative.
I'm only just getting started again after taking a year and a half off... but when I was running AOM I had the same problem. I could get a site indexed quickly, and make a few sales and then my sites would dwindle. Links are great, but I still think the old phrase 'content is king' applies here. With Googles ever changing algos you need content that stands out both to people and spiders and unique and worth bookmarking.
Yes, I think that is probably a more promising approach - starting with quality content, rather than starting with the Amazon feed and working back with content. I haven't had great success with the latter approach (well, OK, I haven't tried THAT hard) - I think there the temptation is to essentially base your site around the shop rather than vice-versa. Probably the key is a small number of well written-up niche products which you gradually build up, which will get you links and ranking. Though if you look, many product searches turn up comparison sites - probably thanks to user reviews and stuff. That's another possibility, but I still think a small niche is the way to go, rather than the entire Amazon catalogue, certainly!