Friday, September 07, 2007

Action Figures and Toy Figure Playsets

I confess that I am a pre-G.I. Joe relic, and I had no idea that action figures had become such a big part of the toy scene. Anyway, here are some of the categories that Amazon.com has buried within their pages:

Action Figures
  • Action Figures: Statues, Maquettes, & Busts

      • So what's the difference between "Action Figures" and "Toy Figures?" It's not entirely clear. Amazon frequently creates categories that overlap. Whether it is a matter of emphasizing certain products by giving them more virtual "shelf space," or that they intend to differentiate the categories later is anybody's guess. In any case, we're featuring both of these categories as a matter of completeness.

      Toy Figures & Playsets
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      Tuesday, September 04, 2007

      Adventures in aStores

      I'm hardly qualified to write a "how-to" on Amazon.com's new aStore features, but I am working with the system, and I'm discovering some undocumented "features."

      First, it seems that the search function for aStores is not enabled if your top-level category consists of hand-selected products. My first aStore is an exception to this rule, so I could be wrong, but stores I've been setting up lately seem to work this way.

      I've also discovered that (not too surprisingly) removing a category also removes its child categories (at least from the navigation), so be VERY careful about that! There seems to be no way to restore the categories nor to remove them altogether.

      Check out these disturbing examples:

      Holly Daze

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      Sunday, September 02, 2007

      Amazon aStores @ Amazon.com

      I've been an Amazon Associate for a long time. (I've even got the t-shirt to prove it!) I was enthusiastic last year when Amazon introduced their "aStore" program where Amazon actually hosts easily created associate store-fronts on their own site at no cost.

      The "amazon.com" domain on these stores even seems to mollify Google's aggressive exclusion of "thin affiliate" content somewhat, although that could always change.

      When Amazon recently expanded the program to include "unlimited nesting" I was thrilled! The initial release of the program allowed you to create pages based on Amazon's browsable categories, but only the top-level and secondary categories. These categories are extremely general, and don't really reflect the way people search for content within Amazon or -- more importantly -- on the wider internet.

      I was gleefully adding categories to my original aStore when I hit a snag. It seems that although you can nest to unlimited depth, the page creation software starts to complain when you reach a certain size, which seems to be about 500 pages. I assume that this is a programming SNAFU, since I couldn't find any mention of such limitations anywhere in the documentation.

      After the critical point is reached, new pages may cause unexpected side-effects with pre-existing pages, particularly erasing them from the site navigation, like this link for Xbox games. The pages may still exist, but neither visitors nor spiders will have much luck finding them!

      If you have external links to your aStore pages this can really cause problems! I would prefer one big store over a collection of "niche market" stores, since people frequently buy two or more unrelated products in one visit. However, since it is already pretty late in the game for new pages to be spidered and included in the SERPs in time for the Christmas shopping season, I'm going ahead and creating multiple aStores now.

      As of this posting, the following stores exist (which is the first step in getting them indexed.) I'll be working hard at populating them with actual content over the next several months, as well as creating more stores. (You can have up to 100 aStores, so with 500 pages each, I can create a mere 50,000 pages -- for this account.)

      Author Mania - My first serious attempt at improving the usability of Amazon's massive site was he aptly titled Browse Amazon Books. I developed about 1500 links before the personal ISP account hosting the pages ran out of room. (10 whole Mb!) I learned that people are more likely to buy fiction than non-fiction, and that they search by author a lot. I'm working hard on this aStore, and already have quite a few products in place.

      More Stores -

      Since I can't do two things at once, and I'm working on the Author Mania store, the following stores may have little or no content, but check back often. They are on my "to do" list!

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