About Amazon Associates

Amazon is an online megastore where almost anything and everything can be bought. You can use this to your advantage to earn yourself some money. Amazon have an affiliate scheme called Amazon Associates, which is a programme that enables you to sell products online and earn referral fees. The best part of this is that you don't have to hold any stock, you are just creating a portal for people to select products from. There is a limitless amount to be made via Amazon and you can typically earn between 5% and 7% for every referral that results in a sale. The more you sell, the higher your percentage per product. Amazon gives you endless possibilities with the types of products you can sell and many options to layout and display the products you choose.

The links and products you choose to use will very much depend on the type of website you have. You are able to choose anything from their database and simply insert the code it generates for you into your site. This means that you can be in control of exactly what appears on your website so you can tailor this to your visitors needs.

There are also programmes on the market which will allow you to do much more than simply choosing individual items. These programmes are capable of displaying nearly all of Amazon's products on your website. This allows you to create the feeling of an ecommerce site and as a result people may purchase more. The great advantage of this method is that you can appear to be a large company selling lots of goods online, when infact you don't have to hold any stock whatsoever. There are drawbacks to using these types of programmes. They are not 100% customisable which means that sometimes it is a challenge fitting it into the look and feel of your site.

However, Amazon have released their own free software called "aStore" which allows you to display the whole Amazon range on your site with no programming skills required. You can customise the aStore to fit in nicely with your existing website very easily via the admin section when you login to Amazon.