AmaHow

This is the “official” Amazon-sponsored forum for Amazon associates.  Frankly, I don’t find it that useful.  Worth a periodic visit, but other forums (like DigitalPoint) are a better use of limited time.

The Digitalpoint Forums are among the most active and useful forums around for webmasters – both novice and pro.  An active subforum is devoted to Amazon Affiliates and is definitely worth visiting at least weekly.  You can ask questions, exchange ideas and discuss your Amazon store experiences.

An added bonus: the DigitalPoint Forums do very well in Google and the other search engines.  Including your store url in your forum “signature” will assure your store gets indexed by the major search engines and may help your search engine ranking as well.

Mr. Rat’s Amazon Product Feed is a totally free script that has lots of loyal followers – but isn’t for the novice without some HTML/coding skills.  This is a very easy script to implement and you have total control over the look and feel of the results, so that you may integrate it into your website fairly easily.

Features:
• Free (as in beer) – Open Source GPL license (as in freedom).
• Easy – put your associate id in the script and your affiliate store is fully stocked and ready to run.
• Simple – the script only requires that Perl be installed on your server.
• Cross-platform – versions of this script are known to be running on both Linux/Apache and Windows/IIS.
• Flexible – control the operation of the script through how you link to it.
• Customizable – change the look and feel of the results through simple HTML template files.
• Established – thousands of web sites are currently running their own Web store with this script.
• Multi-lingual – change the language by editing a simple text file. Currently known to be running on sites in German, Spanish, Japanese, and Estonian.
• Multi-national – works with Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.jp, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.fr.
• Scalable – change a single setting to increase or decrease the cache size to trade between speed and disk space.
• Promotional – all of the searches are automatically cross linked throughout the results for suggestive selling.
• Efficient – many users have remarked how this script returns results faster then shopping directly at Amazon. Now it’s even faster with cached results and prices that are updated hourly.
• Extensive – many ways to list the products you want. Browse all products, list selected products by ASIN, or search by many different methods. Even search for third party products by condition and ASIN or by seller.
• Reliable – the script has been programmed to not make any sales if it cannot find an Associate ID. So that we have done our best to ensure that you get credit for every sale.
• Safe – no URL input is directly used to access your server. All URL input is sanitized to deter hacking.

Examples:
• You can see the script in action on my site displaying Books on Web Services, my Wishlist, or All Bestselling Products.
• I am not a graphic artist, I’m barely a programmer. So don’t judge the quality of the program by how ugly my HTML is, look at what Other Sites are doing with my script

We’ve seen some nice stores built using this script, but it seems to take quite a lot of coding effort to get it a polished, professional look.

PSP Dungeon is an Amazon affiliate store focusing on games, hardware and accessories for the Sony Play Station Portable (PSP) device. Our full inventory includes PSP action games and much more.