Omakase and aStore would be shit hot!

Posted by stuart as , , ,

I’ve been having a bit of a fluff around with Amazon’s aStore. It actually looks like a pretty good product, (although you’re probably going to want to drop it into an i-frame if you want it to look any good), as I wanted to set up a store for BlogWhore.
The thing I found interesting is that you can’t use the Omakase engine (Amazon’s contextual engine) to choose the products shown in the store. You actually have to trawl through thousands of products, to try to work out which ones you want to sell.

Now I would have thought that this would be an ideal use of the contextual technology - leave it up to Amazon to try to work out which products are more likely to sell.

I do wonder whether this is because Amazon don’t trust their contextual engine (I’ve certainly noticed that it tends to rely more on what you told them your site was about in your Amazon Associate profile, rather than what’s on the actual page itself). Maybe this leaves them open to having their system gamed - who knows?

All in all, an interesting product. If you want to see it in action, pop over to the BlogWhore Online Shop

Don’t forget to sign up for BlogWhore - put your site in front of potential advertisers - for free!