Adding An Amazon Store To Your Web Site Made Painless

Writen by Stuart Lewallen

Giving your web site's visitors access to products from Amazon has become virtually painless, using Amazon Web Services (http://aws.amazon.com). Providing this service will give you additional web content as well as providing a valuable resource for visitors, giving them additional reasons for returning. All of this while making you money through Amazon's Associates Program (http://associates.amazon.com).

To start off you have to decide to write the code yourself (the hard way) or use an already developed script. If you choose to go the easy way, there are several commercial (http://www.ghostscripter.com/amazon_shop.php or http://www.esvon.com/pg/products/p_amazon/) and at least one free script (http://www.mrrat.com) to choose from. There are also companies (http://www.ebiz-u.org/) that will host these specific scripts and have experience dealing with them.

Next you will need to set up an free Amazon Associate account (http://associates.amazon.com). This part is easy and straight forward and should take less than 10 minutes from start to finish. Follow this up by creating a free Amazon Web Services account. Again this is simple and should only take a minute or so.

Finally you just need to integrate or install the code. If you bought one of the commercial packages this is pretty simple if you are using a default install and gets more complicated the more you want to customize. The one free script I found was very easy to use and because it was based on templates it was not hard to modify.

When I started looking into this, I decided on an entire store with an electronics theme (http://www.sbaelectronics.com). I used a hosting company that dealt specifically with this script so that I could bother them with my questions when I had them. Getting started in this manner was quick and painless and gave me time to concentrate on other aspects of my site. How you proceed is up to you and will be largely site and need specific.

Thats all there is to it! You have just given your visitors another reason to return to your site and you have a new source of income that could have cost you nothing other than some time spent setting it up.