aStore Proxy | Inline aStore without frames

What is aStore Proxy?

aStore Proxy is a software that you can install on your web server to enable your Amazon aStore to be inline within your website rather than placing it in a frame or iframe.

Enter your aStore URL to see how aStore Proxy works or simply visit The Web Entreprenuer Store.

Note: The url you enter should be your astore link on amazon.com and not your website url where you currently place your astore in the frame. Something like astore.amazon.com/yourstore-20 or astore.amazon.co.uk/yourstore-21

aStore Drawbacks

Amazon's aStore is a great way for Amazon affiliates to quickly build an ecommerce store front without writing any code. However, it has a few drawbacks for the affiliates. They are listed below

Your aStore is on Amazon's aStore website (astore.amazon.com for example) and not your own website.
This makes it difficult to provide a seemless navigation between your website and your aStore.
Forcing you to typically place the aStore in an iframe.
Even then, navigation within the aStore does not bring back the top of your page. Read this amazon associate forum message for more information on this subject.
Further, it's not possible to change the height of the iframe dynamically as the user navigates various pages within your aStore where each page has a diffferent height.
You are passing on your pagerank (link juice) to Amazon's astore website rather than keeping it internal.
Pages within your aStore will not appear in the search because the aStore links contain the session id.
Further, not possible to provide unique content for each product on your aStore to make your aStore product pages rank well.
aStore statistics are available only when there is a checkout. So you don't have complete website statistics. Read this amazon associate forum message for more information on this subject.
Due to lack of complete aStore visitor statistics, you can't effectively use AdWords or other CPC advertising. Check out this digitalpoint forum thread on the topic of Amazon aStore and Adwords.
Some webmasters prefer to provide product link/image that when clicked takes the user to the astore. This is good to mix content and product recommendations and works well for SEO. However, once the user visits the aStore, there is a good chance that the user may leave to some other site without buying anything through the aStore. In this case, not only are you not able to make any affiliate commission, you are also not able to engage the user on your site further so that you could either try to sell something else or make money from your adsense or other pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

aStore Proxy Benefits

Your existing aStore displayed inline rather than in a frame or iframe.
You can maintain a better look and feel, your site branding and seemless navigation providing a better user experience.
Your aStore page titles become part of your website.
You can do further search engine optimization (SEO) for your aStore. You can provide product specific unique content. Check our astore proxy example astore and click on the first product to see additional content at the top.
The session ids are removed making the internal pages of the aStore to be indexable.
You can track complete aStore statistics and not just when a checkout happens.
You can estimate your Orders-To-Clicks ratio in realtime and plan your CPC advertising more accurately.

"The average business metrics improvement after a usability redesign is now 83%. This is substantially less than 6 years ago, but ROI remains high because usability is still cheap relative to gains" - Usability ROI Declining, But Still Strong (Jan 22, 2008).

Also, take a look at this nice forum thread on how to increase site conversion.

How does it work?

Easy. You install aStore Proxy software on your server and do simple configuration, create a html template of your main web page that contains your inline aStore and you are good to go. Everytime a user visits your inline aStore page on your website and browses it, the corresponding page is pulled from amazon's aStore server, the links in it are rewritten to point back to your website and then dipslay the aStore page. Any clicks within the aStore goes back to the aStore Proxy script that then repeats the process fetching the page from Amazon's aStore server.

Is the use of aStore Proxy allowed under Amazon TOS?

Using the associates feedback form we asked

"Is it allowed to use a proxy software on my webserver and fetch my aStore content and blend it with the rest of my website html and display it rather than using an iframe?"

and the reply was

"As long as you display all the content of your aStore, then yes you can use the software on your server to obtain the content to display on your web site. You are not required to use an iframe."

aStore Proxy displays all the content of an aStore. Visit The Web Entreprenuer Store.

How do I get started?

Please read the terms and if you decide to buy aStore Proxy then email staff@astoreproxy.com for pricing (a onetime license fee) and system requirements (what your website hosting solution should support to run aStore Proxy). Please indicate your website, hosting infrastructure (linux vs windows, support for cgi scripts, perl and php) so that we can try to evaluate if aStore Proxy works for you or not. astoreproxy.com is hosted on hostgator and the aStore Proxy script is known to work with this ISP.

This is not a get rich quick scam, but a clever technical solution for a real annoying problem. Once you get your aStore show up inline using aStore Proxy, you still need to do all the hardwork required to get visitors to your website, aStore SEO etc. aStore Proxy is only a first step that helps get your aStore content directly on your website.