Webnomena

I recently wrote about how Amazon website lack some of the new web 2.0 social media characteristics here. I now want to talk about ways to make both amazonassociates; Amazon Affiliate Marketing program, and Amazon website better, more geared toward selling on twitter or other social network, sharing and life stream web site.

This post may seem very specific to Amazon affiliate marketing program but it is not. Most (if not all) of the ideas here can help Any affiliate marketing program developer, making his service better.

As I wrote in my previous post about Amazon I’m not unhappy with what that they are offering, the opposite. I would say that Amazon Affiliate Marketing program is one of the best out there, Amazon Product Advertising API is very powerful, and Amazon web site contains so much valuable information, that all three combined leave other affiliate marketing programs way behind.

With that said, I do believe that the real-time web changed the trade in some ways. I think that there is a growing need for arming the associates (the affiliate marketer) with more products’ news. Sharing on twitter about an old product will result with poor click rate. On the other hand, sharing about a book that is soon to be released and is now available for pre-order will result with way better response.

So here are my suggestions for making amazonassociate program more real-time:

1. Pre-order feed – including ISBN, author name, and release date. Provide feeds (via Product Advertising API) for products that are available for pre-order for a certain month and category.
2. Knowing the exact time of the sell. In the Order Summary report add the timestamp. Knowing when people are buying, and what could tell the associate when to focus his effort on which product. When to tweet the product links.
3. Amazon website
   1. Allow using the Associate code for any page. It does not matter what people buys on Amazon once they get there via the associate links. Since this is the case why restrict the associate links to only product pages. Example: an associate tweet about news related to author and share the link to the author page on Amazon. If someone make a purchase at Amazon getting there via this link why not compensate the associate. This is a great opportunity to increase traffic to the website.
   2. Compensate the Associate who is sharing a product with friends directly from Amazon website. Amazon (not so easy to find) allow sharing a product directly from Amazon’s website via email, twitter, Facebook, delicious and MySpace. If an associate is logged-in and share a product, why not automatically add the associate code. Even better, provide a place to enter bit.ly API code so the link could be to shorten by bit.ly. This will allow the associate to track how many people clicked on the affiliate link.
   3. Improve sorting the search results on Amazon website. Searching for pre-orders other than the popular ones is hard. For example, looking for books about pets that are soon to be release, and available for pre-order, results with items sorted by relevance, by default. In most cases, many items returned from the search, and those are span across many web pages. The associate has the option to sort by Publication Date.  Now, the search result are sorted from the latest publication date to the oldest. This is not bad, but the only problem is that the latest date is too far into the future. E.g. when I tried today the first item’s Publication Date was Jul 19, 2010. This behavior cause extra navigation getting to the desire time frame in the future (usually no more than two months).

People always wanted to know what’s hot, what’s new, and what’s coming next. The new trend of real-time web serves this desire big time. Real-time search engine, augmented reality, location based services are all products of this need. The technology is out there. I think that the affiliate marketing world should adapt too.  It is time to revisit the way things are built to serve the new real-time affiliate marketer.

Amazon is one of the technology leaders of our era. Amazon leads in  eCommerce, Web services, Cloud Computing. Now, Amazon is about to revolutionize the way that people reads books with its Kindle eReeder (I have one and am loving it). Amazon owns the biggest electronic book library out there with more than 350,000 titles. This is the company that was the web 1.0 symbol bringing collaborate filtering to eCommerce and allowing third parties to sell via Amazon’s web site. amazonassociates is one of the best affiliate marketing program out there arming its affiliate marketer with great information and tools for earning commission from product sold on Amazon web site.

Yet, looking at Amazon web site in compare to newer web sites it seem as if if sharing and user engagement is not a priority. Amazon’s web site does not provide what that is knows as web 2.0 look and feel.

Sharing

Blogs, web-sites, social networks, micro blogging tools all have today one or two ways for sharing information:

• Share out – by sharing content from the web site with the rest of the world via social networks, social bookmarking, life feed and more. This could be done using widgets like addthis button, RSS feed, built-in twitter, friendfeed and others sharing buttons (social toolbar).
• Share in or across – by aggregating discussions from multiple websites and blogs into social networks using widget like disqus, intensedebate, Facebook Connect and others.

Amazon does offer to share out via email, twitter, facebook, delicious, and MySpace but it is done via link to another pop-up window. Other web sites offers large enough buttons for one click sharing content. It is better to add the social buttons right there on the page and to separate those  from the old way of sharing via email.

Amazon does provide a way to start discussions but only among people that are on that web site and there is no way for bringing relevant discussion from other forums, and social networks – there is no share in or across.

I recently read this quote on If you like it, tell a friend… blog post.  It was trying to explain the phenomenon of dwindling books reviews on Amazon.

People no longer feel the need to comment on blogs, Amazon, etc. b/c they can recommend or comment on their Facebook pages where their own intimates will know what they think and how they feel. Their compulsion to share is satiated.

So where are my friends? They are not on Amazon website! They are on Facebook, Twitter and another dozen social networks.

Amazon website seems today like it went half way towards becoming social. In a web2.0 world, we got use to share In and Out easily. We use to follow discussions from one online service to another.

I think that the question is how can Amazon bring all the great product reviews and blog comments out there into its website? How will they be able to reconnect fragmented information that can help people to make their purchase decisions. I want my friends opinion! Are we going to see Amazon Connect? Maybe by making small improvements and bringing some of the social tools listed above to its web site, Amazon will increase user’s engagement and bring more relevant content in.

Amazon and Real-time (web 3.0)? Well that’s another blog post:)