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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Amazon Is Parochial

I find Amazon something of a paradox. They have some very innovative thinking in their retail business, and I find the "associates" scheme very effective (I am now using their AStore to manage three of my interests lists, on photography, books and music). Yet they have an amazing blind spot when it comes to geography.

The problem is this; the Associates schemes for each country are distinct. They have stores in many different countries and they expect me to maintain totally separate accounts on each of them. I could live with that, but it gets worse. To earn credit for a sale delivered in a country, I have to have an account in that country and I have to use the unique ID for that country in the referral. To do that, I would have to know which country the reader resides in. Amazon provides no assistance in doing this. The result is that, in the case of AStore, I need to have completely separate stores for each country. I don't bother, the return on the effort isn't worth it since my primary motivation is actually having a simple CMS rather than driving revenue anyway.

How can such an advanced company have such a huge blind-spot when it comes to the international nature of the Internet? I have readers in every country where Amazon does business, and from one page I could be gathering attention for their products in all those countries. As it is, they pretty much force me to focus just on the readers in the UK and the US. How myopic and reactionary. Come on, Amazon, get with the Web on this one.

Labels: Amazon, Books, Music, website

posted at 1:56 PM (UK) | Comment? (3 so far) | links to this post | |

A-mazing

I set up an Amazon AStore in the Autumn just to see what was involved and thought nothing more of it. I linked to it from my home page (see the Cameras link on the left) and it seems people have been clicking it.

Lots of people. I just found there was over $170 in commissions waiting from the last quarter, on $4000 of sales. Now, compared with Guy Kawasaki's AdSense income that's pennies, but it's more than paid for my web hosting, so thank-you to all of you who clicked through to Amazon that way!

Labels: Amazon, website

posted at 1:25 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |