How To Build Amazon Affiliate Niche Stores
Affiliate niche stores can be a good source of online income, if set up properly. The concept is simple: pick a niche, get a script to pull the products list from the merchant, make a nice layout, promote your affiliate niche store and enjoy the profits.
In reality, first of all you need to be approved by the merchants or by the affiliate networks where you are going to get the products from. An excellent option is eBay Partners Network, which allows you to sell eBay products from your affiliate store and get paid commissions. The best software for building eBay niche stores is called BANS (Build A Niche Store). It costs $97 and you can build unlimited number of stores. If you want to know more about working eBay affiliate niche stores, check out Vic’s tutorial on how to build a BANS store. You could also browse through his older posts, in order to find out more about keyword research and niche narrowing strategy.
Is eBay Willing To Make Money With Everyone?
At first sight, eBay Partners Network seems to be warmly inviting everyone to join. Aren’t we all equal? Indeed we are, but some of us are more equal than others. Fact is that Romania is set up on automatic rejection in EPN (eBay Partners Network). If you dare to argue that, you’ll end up in infinite passing shots from one client service executive to another, until they make it clear that you are not wanted, regardless your experience, your knowledge or your 20 BANS sites built just to give them an example of what you can do to help them make more money. They simply don’t want you in, it’s their business and they don’t feel like explaining you the reasons.
Bye Bye eBay, Hello Amazon!
In my own experience, Amazon sucks! All I ever managed to sell were Christmas trees stands and a few books about personal development and Microsoft Excel. It is true that I never promoted them too much, those sales came from some links I slapped in the sidebar of one of my blogs for a while.
But if you take it seriously and develop focused niche stores, Amazon can be as good as eBay, and the niche stores can be built in about 10-15 minutes each, after you get used to the software. Like eBay, Amazon has the great advantage for the affiliates of being a trusted online source, so buyers are sure that they are really going to receive the items they order online.
Amazon’s commissions for affiliates range between 4% and 10% of the product’s price, depending on the quantity of items you sell each month and of the category those products belong in.
EBay gives affiliates 50% of their profit on items sold via their websites. I don’t know how big this profit is, because I was not accepted into the program (yet 
), but it is possible that this 50% commission equals the Amazon 4%-10% one on the selling price. What eBay has and Amazon doesn’t is the $25 you get paid for any new member joining from your affiliate links.
What Affiliate Store Script Is Best For Amazon?
Diana and I have tested quite a few scripts over the past two weeks. Some of them were free, some others required monthly payments, others were free with the condition that 10% of your affiliate income goes to the developers. We even tried to hack BANS to make it work with Amazon, but our programming skills and willingness to do it are far too low by comparison with the advantages we’d get by using BANS for this purpose.
We decided to go for Associate-o-Matic, for the following reasons:
- It is easy to use: after a few days of practice, we can now build a basic Amazon affiliate niche store in less than 15 minutes. As the idea is to build as many stores as we can in the shortest possible time, this was the most important criterion in our quest. Now each of us has the ability to build 10 stores a day, so in one month from now we expect to have quite a nice portfolio. As we were not sure on how the stores would perform, we are building a big part of them on .info domains, which we bought for the nice promotional price of $0.99 from GoDaddy (and I believe the promotion is still ongoing, in case you are interested).
- It allows adding content to the store pages: like in BANS case, you can add top and bottom text boxes in which to place your keywords rich text. You can also add separate pages, if so you wish.
- It can be easily optimized for search engines:
There is a panel with mod_rewrite options, you go there and make your choices, then you are pointed to the code you need to put in your .htaccess file. This option is available only for the paid version (which can be tested for free for 30 days).
There is another panel in which you can input your meta tags, like keywords, description and site title. - It costs $97, one time fee, and you are allowed to build as many affiliate stores as you wish. We liked it very much that we were allowed to test the full version for 30 days, so we have time to see if we can get used to that dashboard which really looks overwhelming at first sight.
A slightly upsetting fact, which may result in lower conversions than in the eBay - BANS combination, is that buyers stay on your site until they want to make the payment. Only then are they redirected to the Amazon website, which is too late in my opinion. Like eBay, Amazon also works with cookies, so it actually doesn’t matter if the shopper buys an item from my store, or something from the Amazon website, as long as she got there via my affiliate links. So I wish all buyers to get off my site and go to Amazon as quickly as possible, because some of them would probably change their mind before pressing the Pay button. This means I’d never get paid, because they didn’t have the chance to get to Amazon via my referral link. I can smell here a poor conversion rate, but since the stores are so easy to build, why not give it a try? It’s a set and almost forget income source, so it can be a winner even with this major drawback as I see it.
So, if eBay Partner Network doesn’t like your blue eyes, you can give Amazon a try. If you don’t want to take our word for granted and set up your stores with Associate-o-Matic, we’d be happy to hear about your experience with other programs. If you wish to test Associate-o-Matic, we’d advise you to download directly the full version, as you won’t be required to give your billing details for that. After 30 days, you’ll be free to have your choice: either pay the $97 and stay with the full variant of the script, or get downgraded to the lite version, which has the disadvantages that you cannot use mod_rewrite and 10% of your earnings go to the developers of the script.
We are going to make a video to show you how to set up an Amazon affiliate store using Associate-o-Matic, in order to help you overcome the initial sensation of a very complicated thing (we had it, and I’m sure you’ll have it, too).
Until then, we are curious about your thoughts on this issue. Also, if anybody from the “forbidden countries” was accepted and is willing to share the trick with us, he is more than welcome to do it.
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Simonne would love to know your turn out I would love to know I was actually talking about this exact thing last night to some folks on Skype call coming next month I am building big time adsense niches but the coming month I want to get into Amazon as you said my experience is the same horrible conversion but in a store format like our BANS it might change and at the end of the day it is another revenue stream and as you know I am all about multiple streams
Vic’s last blog post..Hide Your Affiliate Links Free Tool
Ha, ha! Isn’t this funny? I’m big fan of AdSense, but I have to agree that such niche stores are so easy to build, that it would be almost a shame not to do it. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t offer products feeds. I’ve read somewhere that they may let you download feeds if you ask them on purpose, but those feeds suck big time, with lots of products which are not any more for sale. At the end of the day, it is possible that the best idea would be to make niche stores using data feeds from other merchants, who pay as much as 15-20% or even more, from the products price. The issue here is that those merchants may not be so well-known as eBay and Amazon, thus resulting again in poor conversions, because people fear scams (and who can blame them?).
I can’t wait to see how the stores will convert, and I’m curious what you’re going to use for your Amazon stores.
I’ve nagged about it in past, but I guess I am going to nag about it in future as well …
Biggest problem in Amazon affiliate stuff is that it doesn’t work well in global scale. It probably works reasonably well, if you are based in USA and your readers are in USA. However, if your based in Europe and your readers are in USA, you face the dilemma on whether you should choose amazon.com or amazon.co.uk.
Amazon.co.uk would pay your money through bank transfer and they are good choice for Europeans, since Europeans who order from amazon.co.uk don’t have to worry about sales tax, customs, etc. (which would be the case with shipment from amazon.com).
On the other hand, people in Finland have got used to EUR, readers from USA would prefer to get prices in USD, …, but amazon.co.uk always shows prices in GBP.
Also why would reader from USA buy book from amazon.co.uk, if he can find same product from amazon.com …
Juha Ylitalo’s last blog post..Earth
Of course readers form USA won’t buy from Amazon.co.uk, which is anyway more expensive, even if it wasn’t about the taxes. I’m based in Europe, but most of the traffic for my sites comes from USA, therefore I’m using Amazon.com. However, with the US dollar going down so much, I think Amazon.co.uk is definitely worth investigating. But traffic to it has to be from UK, because this is the most expensive country in Europe. At least I wouldn’t buy anything from UK, because I can get the same thing cheaper in other countries, like Austria for example.
Sounds great, I wouldn’t mind having a shot at this, any progress on the A’-o-matic video tutorial?
I would have thought that they would have their own for people not versed on uploading files etc, people like me that is.Some may not bother if there is no tutorial!
Hey Brian, stay tuned, we will release the video in about one week or so. We just want to make some more tests, in order to be able to get exactly the results we need, especially for very narrow niches, where simply inputting the node number and a keyword is not enough.
Thanks.
I Can’t wait Simonne!!
Amazon.com is a superb resource for monetizing just about anything imaginable onlines including anvils, tractor trailers, coffee sweeteners and more!
I generally get between $50 to $60 whenever anyone buys an HDTV off of my site, for example.
Data points,
Barbara
Barbara Ling’s last blog post..You Make Money When You Catapult Yourself To Being The FIRST to Lead The Thundering Herd
This is great, Barbara. If research and promotion are properly done, money should follow.
Hello Simonne.
Any news on the video yet?
Perhaps you will e-mail me when you have it done.
Regards, brian
Hello Brian,
I’ve got it almost done, I think it will be up tomorrow. I’ll e-mail you, no problem.
Hi Simonne,
Is the video ready? I’m interested in this software but need to learn how it works first. can you email me the videos once ready?
Hi, it’s ready, you can watch it at : http://www.ezmoneyon.net/how-to-set-up-an-amazon-affiliate-store-using-associate-o-matic/
[…] to be offering fairly impartial advice, so I’m keeping an open mind, I also found out that they are followers of Vic who is himself an advocate of finding scammers […]