Recently in amazon Category

Amazon recently opened their Italian site to the public.
It's located at amazon.it - obviously!



So what about their affiliate program?
It's available too, but be warned - if you don't speak Italian you may have issues, as they don't seem to like answering queries in English.

If you are an Amazon affiliate then this little tip from Bit.ly might be of interest.

They've made available a little snippet for Firefox users who want to easily create bit.ly links to Amazon.

NB: You have to be in the Amazon Associates control panel to use this ie. it won't work with the Amazon sitebar

Thanks to @werner for mentioning it on Twitter

Amazon have launched yet another feature for their affiliates - Site Stripe

As you browse the Amazon site you can easily link to any product you see without having to mess about with the Amazon Associates section:

The Associates Site Stripe lets you build your Associates links right from the Amazon page itself. The Site Stripe will appear at the top of every Amazon page and provides quick and easy access for building links, adding products to your aStore and even seeing your reports. The Associates Site Stripe is a convenient alternative to using some of the Associate Central linking and reporting tools.

It looks like this:



I haven't had much time to play with it, but it looks like it could be a really useful weapon in an affiliate's arsenal

Amazon are always introducing new and interesting ways to hook into their content, however obviously not all methods work as well as others.

As of October 14 2008 the "context links" system will be retired.

The context links system seemed like a good idea, but it probably didn't work as well in reality as it did in theory.

In case you're wondering what they were:

Context Links - You create the content. We'll link it. Context Links are a quick and convenient way to add links to your page and help you monetize your content. Context Links automatically identify and link relevant phrases within your page content to Amazon products

There's still plenty of other link methods available, so it's no great loss!

Amazon, in common with a lot of big ecommerce site, makes use of RSS for a number of things including lists of top sellers. In case you didn't spot the post over on their official affiliate blog, you can easily generate RSS for any category AND add your affiliate ID.

The RSS feed includes the title of the item and very little else (there might be "thicker" versions available if you go digging, but I haven't found them yet), so it would be quite easy to grab a feed and integrate it with pretty much any sort of site you want. Adding some basic styling etc., and you've got a nice little top list.

Amazon UK's DVD rental business has been taken over by a 3rd party (LoveFilm), so the DVD rental referrals will no longer be part of the affiliate program as of today, May 20th 2008.

If you're an Amazon affiliate with US traffic then you'll be interested to know that they've added yet another widget to their arsenal - the Mp3 widget.

It's a Flash based player which targets their growing selection of audio.

Here's a sample:

Amazon has been adding lots of "widgets" for its affiliates over the last year. The latest "toy" they've added is called the carousel.

If you frequent the "my amazon" part of Amazon US you're probably already familiar with the format

It's available in both horizontal and vertical versions and has a couple of other features that are definitely worth mentioning.

• Custom products - build up a selection of products based on searching the Amazon catalogue

• Update existing widgets without changing the code

• Easy integration with most blogging platforms

Here's one I did up which took me about a minute:

It's not everyday that a merchant announces a significant increase in their payout levels, however IWOOT's latest announcement does just that.

In what could best be described as a bold move the UK gadget shop emailed their affiliates earlier today to announce that they intended to take on their competition headon by increasing commissions across the board to an impressive 13% flat rate. Amazon, which was one of the first companies to offer an affiliate solution, for example, offers a flat rate of 4% or scaling commission system with an upper limit of 8.5%.

The new commission structure comes into play on April 1st.