Amazon beta testing little custom stores

August 31, 2006

I got an email yesterday from Amazon, because I’m on their Associates list. I haven’t actually sold anything thru my associates link, but I’m on their mailing list so I got contacted about the beta test of a new service called “aStore”. I assume the lower-case “a” in front stands for “amazon”, or it could just be “a Store” with the space removed.

Anyway it’s kinda cool, you can build a featured page where you put 9 products, and then create sub-pages with are in essence canned searches of the various Google categories. And you get to customize the colors and fonts, but the basic layouts are fixed in terms of column widths and number of products per page. I’ve put my aStore here.

The one downside I see is that you can only have one canned search per category. So for example if I wanted to have one page that was a search for all books by George RR Martin, and a second page that was a search for all books about Oracle Database, I’m out of luck. I can only build one canned search for the Book category.

Now you can build sub-category pages so for example I could have a George RR Martin search page within the Science Fiction/Fantasy sub-category. But again I’m limited to one instance of each sub-category, so I could not have a second Sci Fi search for Battlestar Galactica, for example.

Still it’s a cool first stab at this. I could see this being nifty for really focused groups, say a book club. They could build a page where the Feature Products would be the next few books planned for the reading list. That way members could check the aStore to find and purchase the books.

I’m just hoping they eventually let you build multiple pages per category, so that I can have multiple Book searches listed in the aStore.