Amazon Associates Show Off New Retail Trends

It's been said that 2008 is definitely the year of the Affiliate, but to be more precise, it's the year of the Amazon Associate. This year, we've seen a major growth in niche retail websites that specialize in a wide range of categories from Amazon's vast product catalog.

At first glance, most visitors hardly recognize that sites such as StockMyOffice.com , EcoFriendlyShoppingOnline.com or OnlineToolsandHardware.com are all websites designed and developed specifically for use with the Amazon Associates program. The website owner pays a small fee for the hosting and development of the design, then the they spend the next few months marketing the newly branding sites. With Amazon offering anywhere from 4-15% commissions for each item sold, website owners can quickly realize what making money while they sleep feels like.

Amazon Associates can earn any thing from a few dollars to hundreds of thousands per month. Large shopping comparison engines like Yahoo! Shopping, become.com, mysimon.com, pricegrabber.com, and others are rumored to be some of the highest volume associates. The Amazon Associates program has evolved from it's modest beginnings, associates can do anything from link to products, or consume vast amounts of xml product data via the Amazon Associates E-commerce Service.

Amazon recently completed a new Site Stripe feature and cleaner redesign of the Amazon Associates Central. They have essentially made it easier to link to various products and to access reporting. Amazon's vast number of Assocaites have helped Amazon stay #1 in online retail and become the original molding from which all other retail affiliate programs are based.

It will be interesting to watch what happens to the online retail market place as the old establishment of brick and motar retailers compete directly against affiliate marketers. I believe that affiliate marketing will allow a site like marketer branded site like WeKnowPhoto.com to compete against a brick and mortar brand ritzcamera.com. It will be interesting to say the least.

My Experience With Amazon S3

Well, after waiting a significant amount of time since the release of Amazon S3, I decided to dip my toe in the waters and see what it feels like. I'm happy to say that my expectations have been met. By using Amaozn S3, I was able to improve the performance of my existing infrastructure, and the visitor experience.

As a web developer and general internet guru, I spend time reading things about website performance, and other crazy notions of a better user experience. By using Amazon's S3 for all of my static content, I reduce the amount of requests Apache needs to serve on our own servers. Instead of wasting the more valuable system resources of my web server to serve images, javascript files, flash and other static content, this can now be offered to my website visitors on a world-class content delivery network, Amazon S3.

The speed improvement on the website I tested (WeKnowPhoto) was immediately noticable. Offsetting the regular Apache web requests by serving images and other static content on S3 means more capacity on my existing data center servers. Essentially more bang and less bucks to provide a much faster loading website. Speed is such a critical component to the enjoyment of a web visit. Everyone hates a slow loading website. If you're anything like me, then you can remember the days of dial up modems, and the excruitiating pain that was requesting a web page.

I'm considering moving the entire E4E platform to S3. This way, clients can enjoy the benefits of having their content on a cdn. Might be an additional option for some clients, or just a value added service, haven't come to a conclusion on that yet.

Getting Ready For Amazon S3

I've been considering using's Amazon S3 for a while now. I think of the S3 service as an inexpensive content delivery network that can reduce the over all load on my servers, while improving overall site performance. My main interest is in uploading static content files like css, javascript and images.



By uploading those page objects to Amazon's S3, my web server can simply focus on rendering php pages, and not worry about serving images and other static content. I expect the modest expense to pay for itself in the additional capacity that each single server can offer. This will reduce datacenter equipment expenses, and administration time, so I'm all for it.

I like the idea that I can manage an S3 account via a plugin in my browser. I've been using Amazon's Ec2 and I manage it the same way, right from my browser.

Maybe SysteMax Will Buy Circuit City

With Circuit City going the way of CompUsa, a potential exists for the remaining Circuit City assets to be snatched up by SysteMax, parent company of TigerDirect. With Circuit City closing out the majority or all of their stores, the remaining assets such as it's brand, website, and inventory, might look like an attractive purchase for companies looking to break into consumer electronics market.

I would think for a company like SysteMax, the Circuit City database of customers and the brand itself would be a very attractive aquisition. The Circuit City brand is very well established, and to be honest, has a deeper market penetration with regards to general consumer electronics then any of the other SysteMax brands. Most of the SysteMax brands are focused on the geeks, who regularly build their own computers.

In either case, Circuit City's main competitor Best Buy is sure to be happy that it will finally be dominant in it's market. Circuit City claims that it will continue to operate, however, I wouldn't be buying an extended warranty from them anytime soon, lol.