Create your own Amazon aStore step-by-step |
For those who want to build their own Amazon aStore check your Amazon affiliates aStore area. It is beta and you need to be an Amazon affiliate (associate) for that link to work. The aStore generator received top billing inside the associates area this morning. The name is a bit strange, I’m glad it says ’store’ and not ‘hole’ but the interface is straightforward, here are step-by-step instructions with screenshots for creating your own aStore. It should take only a few minutes.
STEP 1. Searching by keywords for products you want to add. This can be anything in Amazon’s deep catalog of products.
STEP 2. Add up to nine featured products. You can add a small number of additional words about each product like what you like about the product/service. In my example, I added some TV show complete series I like because I think these are some of the best DVD deals out there. For a little more than the cost of a single movie (1.5 - 3 hours) you can get a complete season worth of shows to watch. And of course all the extras.
STEP 3. Select and customize the background, foreground, header and link colors and logo. You can enter the hex code for colors and add a full URL to a logo. I whipped up a custom logo for the store and linked to it. No option to upload the logo and use Amazon’s bandwidth.
STEP 4. Optionally add widgets. If you want to show other related products, your wish lists and more then check the applicable boxes. There is currently a choice to place the widget on the left or right.
STEP 5. Optionally add categories and subcategories. I added “DVD” and the subcategory “Television.” This would allow targeting your store to specific content as I have done in this example store.
STEP 6. Link to your aStore and promote. Here is my completed Hmm TV Shows aStore. If you’d like to see another store, see Darren’s post. Darren also makes some good observerations and suggestions like it would be more useful if you could create aStores on your own domains and create more than one aStore. Once aStores leave beta hopefully they will have these features. Also, I’d add it would be good to be able to feature more than nine products on a page.
As I went to publish this post I’m receiving lots of errors on Amazon’s aStore interface, so the aStore system might not be available when you try the links above. Give it some time and check the aStore area later if that’s the case.
Update 12:16pm PST: It’s not just the Amazon associate area, it’s all of Amazon that’s down at the moment. Yikes.
Did this post make you go hmm?
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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Since you don’t allow hotlinking to your images and you put your images in our feed, they look funny when viewed from a Web-based aggregator. FYI.
Comment by Randy Charles Morin — August 21, 2006 @ 4:52 pm PST
That’s incorrect, Randy. I have a long list of RSS Readers that hotlinks are allowed to and I will usually add to the list if it’s not some fly by night reader. All the common ones should be covered including Bloglines and Newsgator.
What feed reader are you talking about Randy that you use where the images are broken? It’s not open to every online reader, particularly due to the number of splogs out there republishing almost everything I write.
Got to be much more specific here and I’m happy to help.
Comment by TDavid — August 21, 2006 @ 5:10 pm PST
I use Rmail and via the emails in Gmail. You could use Rmail to via the emails in any email reader, including Yahoo! mail, Hotmail, live.com mail, etc.
Comment by Randy Charles Morin — August 21, 2006 @ 5:40 pm PST
Which Rmail are you talking about? Link?
Comment by TDavid — August 21, 2006 @ 5:54 pm PST
http://www.r-mail.org/
Comment by Randy Charles Morin — August 21, 2006 @ 6:04 pm PST
You can sign up by email to the official feed via Feedblitz, see the home page for the necessary form. Email is email, I don’t see the point in supporting multiple email readers unless I’m missing some great feature of Rmail here, but this is my knee jerk response, I’m going to subscribe to the feed myself and see what’s going on before making a final decision.
Comment by TDavid — August 21, 2006 @ 6:11 pm PST
BTW Randy - I wish you would have just been upfront with me and said: I have an RSS to email solution I wrote called r-mail and would like you to include in your allowed to hotlink list for Hmm rather than what you did in comment #1 which made me think you were a reader complaining about broken images. The way you did it here just rubs me totally the wrong way. Why the smoke and mirrors? Just shoot straight with me, mon. Please.
Comment by TDavid — August 21, 2006 @ 6:21 pm PST
No smoke and mirrors David. I don’t add disclosure statements to my blog comments and expecting such seems rather ridiculous to me. I didn’t even mention Rmail in my original comment. You asked which RSS reader I used.
Further, the problem has nothing to do with Rmail. Your images are not rendering in a vast many RSS readers, not just Rmail. You are blocking these RSS readers in your website configuration. I was just trying to point out that images are not rendering in many RSS readers.
Unsubscribed.
Comment by Randy Charles Morin — August 21, 2006 @ 8:23 pm PST
Randy - if you were legitimately concerned about images showing up in your reading environment and not being blocked, then how am I supposed to know about what reader you are using without asking? Talk about ridiculous all you want but I don’t have mind reading skills. I had to ask or ignore you what reader you were using. And then you responded with a sentence that is missing words. Make some sense, mon, please.
Read the discussion above aloud to yourself. You came here with what sounded like an attitude and still seem to have one. Bad hair day or what? If I read something into your words wrongly, then please accept my apologies for that. I don’t talk in riddles, you see, I talk straight. You might not like hearing some of what I’m saying but I’d like to think from reading me for awhile you already understood that’s who I am.
Remember you and I disagreeing over what was and wasn’t spam some time ago concerning Pubsub activity in the comments area here? I do. We were able to agree to disagree there.
Now who the heck is David? I think some 3,500+ times my byline has appeared here and I didn’t even do a query for how many times my name has been used in the comments area (sometimes wrongly like you did, above). If you can mistake my name then maybe you are making a mistake with this error you are reporting with the images, yes/no?
(or was the name thing intentional, Andy?)
Blog images showing up just fine in Rmail with Gmail test here and I signed up for Rmail earlier today. Anybody else want to test and get back to me since Randy appears to have left the building? The entire google domain is unblocked by this server and Gmail is at mail.google.com. Images should be showing there just fine. They work for me.
Taking his ball and going home because I don’t want to promote using his email to RSS solution (we already are using a different one, see home page) or because I told him I didn’t like how he went about things in the comment area here? Confused, I am.
At any rate, much thicker skin needed.
Randy, if you are still around to read this and were legitimately trying to help me then thank you, let’s work through the problem because obviously by your reaction I’m misunderstanding what you were trying to do with your comment above that has nothing to do with Amazon aStore (a rule of the comments area here, BTW). That was our first problem. If you wanted to talk to me about a technical problem with the site, why is it happening on a post about Amazon’s new aShop? Read this post as it might be helpful. I’m really not that difficult to contact directly for these kinds of things.
My Skype and Gmail emails are both my name, but you do have to get that right for the message to get through. Or you can add the word “Private” to a post and add a few letters to your login name here and we can have a private dialog without your comments or mine appearing publically.
Ball back in your court.
If you want to be more on topic somewhere here and keep this discussion out in the public, then here’s a better thread (from nearly two years ago, BTW) to have this discussion, or let’s take this one on directly.
I might start a new post updating why I use htaccess to block images anyway, but most my feelings remain. I’d rather limit third party site activity so I don’t have to resort to showing more ads like you do on your blogs. When we talked about that recently you made a point to remind me that you couldn’t impact your income. Well, now the shoe is on the other foot here. Maybe you can see where I’m coming from there.
If I’m Google’s context engine I’m struggling now with what any of this commentary has to do with Amazon aShops. Hotlinking isn’t related. I can see where you wanted to comment about the image issue, but I probably should have removed your original comment and replied to you directly so we could have done all this out of public.
Hindsight always 20/20.
Comment by TDavid — August 21, 2006 @ 9:19 pm PST
I’m not interested in pursuing this further, I tried to help you and you keep bashing me in return. Sorry, but that’s where it ends with me. The David was assumed. Your sig is TDavid. I assumed your last name was David. Sorry, but I don’t recall your actual name.
Comment by Randy Charles Morin — August 21, 2006 @ 9:31 pm PST
As I figured, Randy, you weren’t really interested in helping to fix the problem, just a thinly veiled and poorly executed vendor pitch situation. Try that on somebody who hasn’t been around as long as I have.
Comment by TDavid — August 21, 2006 @ 9:56 pm PST
Obviously you’re not interested in moving on as you suggested earlier, but rather you’re just want to bash me some more. It was obviously not a vendor pitch, I didn’t even mention Rmail when I reported the problem. I think your readers can read this themselves and make their own decisions.
Comment by Randy Charles Morin — August 21, 2006 @ 10:13 pm PST
No, Randy, I’m not interested in “moving on” and please point above to where I ever said I was interested in moving on? I am very much interested in fixing the problem and that’s the point where you said you were taking your ball and going home, hence my comments that your intentions here do not seem altruistic. You are still here so if you want this to be productive — and I think you do — then as I said, the ball is in your court.
You pointed me to Rmail. I subscribed to Rmail with my feed and what did I find? Images are showing for me inside Gmail. I don’t see the problem you mentione in #1.
And I suppose the keywords embedded to look like they are content from here are not vendor pitches either, Randy? No disclosure either that I saw. Screenshot here. Yeah, I think readers can draw their own conclusions as I have about that.
Feedblitz doesn’t embed context tags for their posts back to their own search engine (kbcafe) like you’re doing with Rmail above the fold directly beneath the post. And I’m not aware of anybody that does it that way to make it above the fold as if it’s something we’ve tagged here. That’s deceptive, Randy, sorry.
Whatever you think of me or this exchange at this point, at least please change that. Put those tags below the fold with your other Rmail advertising.
Comment by TDavid — August 21, 2006 @ 10:25 pm PST
Have a nice day
Comment by Randy Charles Morin — August 21, 2006 @ 10:37 pm PST
A spade is a spade is a spade.
Comment by TDavid — August 21, 2006 @ 10:39 pm PST
[…] Randy Charles Morin who unsubscribed from Hmm in a huff the other night lists what he calls “10 mistakes made by my blogging friends” Since I’m probably not high on his friends list at the moment and more importantly because I disagree with a number of things in his post, I’ll go ahead and list 10 mistakes he made in his post. This technique is bound to move your position in a friend’s list. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » 10 mistakes made by a non-friend blogger — August 23, 2006 @ 3:21 pm PST
You two sound like mature pre-schoolers
Comment by Kiltak — August 23, 2006 @ 9:40 pm PST
I thought we were discussing about aStore? THX for your step-by-step explanation and unfortunately you can only set up one store. For most of hobby-webmasters this will be enough but I need more …
Comment by Amazon aStore — August 23, 2006 @ 11:01 pm PST
[…] Crap. I’ve been behind on my reading, and I missed this comment thread on Monday — but I could almost feel it coming for months. Randy and TDavid both have strong opinions, and they stand just far enough apart on some issues that an outstretched hand can easily resemble a pointed finger. […]
Pingback by Not seeing the picture -- Chip’s Quips — August 24, 2006 @ 10:41 am PST
[…] Curious about the wide variety of PC controllers I whipped up an Amazon PC Gamepads aStore and used an iframe to insert below [learn how to create your own Amazon aStore]. […]
Pingback by Your favorite PC Gamepad? » Make You Go Hmm — November 24, 2006 @ 11:46 am PST
Just to update. You can now create upto 99 aStores and there’s quite few new features available now! I have also created a little astore tutorial website (click on my sig) though there isn’t any debate about RSS feeds on it!
Comment by Roo — June 1, 2007 @ 6:36 am PST
aStore is now officially out of beta and you can now create multiple stores, create custom categories, and integrate with more Amazon features. Also, they are increasing the amount an aStore can earn you through the Christmas season.
BTW ‘Randy Charles Morin’ made a good number of backlinks through his comments here!
Comment by Simon — October 13, 2009 @ 8:08 am PST