Thursday, September 20, 2007

Women's Shoes

Men will never understand the relationship between women and their shoes! Now, before I get myself into any (more) trouble -- let me just say that Amazon.com's "Women's Shoes" category is a lot bigger than I expected. So even as I am working on width-first expansion of my Amazon aStores, I sometimes have to do a little depth-first probing to get a sense of the relative size of a category.

Such is the case with the Fashion Mania Store, which has been expanded by adding Shoe Mania just for shoes, Womenswear World for Women's Clothing, Menswear World for Men's Clothing and Accessories, The Clothes Horse for Boys', Girls', and Infants' Clothing, and Accessorize! for Women's Accessories and other odds and ends.

If you've been following this blog, you won't be surprised to learn that these stores are, as of this posting, not complete. They are growing daily though, so by the time you read this they may be very helpful.

Now, without further ado, here is our guide to Amazon.com's many subcategories of Women's Shoes:

Note that Amazon.com establishes the available categories, frequently in combinations many may find odd. For example, "Athletic & Outdoor" (which we abbreviate "Athletic") contains things like "Athletic (i.e. "Outdoor") Sandals" & "Athletic Rain Boots." Amazon.com also determines which items are included in each category, which can also produce some odd results -- but by and large browsing categories will help you find what you're looking for better than Amazon's keyword search.

It is also worth noting that although some "duplicate" categories like Boots: Hiking and Athletic: Hiking Boots generally contain the same items, they are displayed in a different order due to differences in the way Amazon customers arrive at those items.

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Monday, September 17, 2007

My Top-Level aStores

Google has frequently stated that there is no "sandbox" for new websites, but Google Engineer and frequent source of Google SEO information Matt Cutts reveals that there are anti-spam measures that would seem like a sandbox for some pages.

Whether you consider that to be splitting hairs or not, it seems clear that a width-first deployment of my new aStores will be better received by Googlebot than a depth-first approach. (Probably not in time for Christmas, though.)

In any case, here are my current "top-level" aStores. Many are just stubs -- one top-level category only -- as I post this, although I am immediately beginning to add second-level categories, so you may find considerably more depth reading this now.

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Sunday, September 16, 2007

Mysteries & Thrillers (All Authors)

While the Mystery and Thriller genres have always been popular favorites, critical acclaim has, with a few notable exceptions largely eluded these authors. Mickey Spillane, author of the Mike Hammer Series, summarized the situation pretty well when he said, "I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends."

This is a large category, and I may try to divide it into separate "Mystery" and "Thriller" categories in the future, but since most mysteries are thrilling, and many thrillers are mysterious such a split would necessarily be somewhat arbitrary, and for now, at least they remain lumped together as Amazon has them.

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