Amazon aStore Retirement Fact Sheet

I have some website projects still using Amazon aStore and now it is going for retirement. Here’s the news from Amazon affiliate website.

The Amazon Associates Program will be retiring the aStore product by October 27, 2017. After this date, you will no longer have the ability to earn fees from your aStore pages. Please find additional detail, as well as key dates and alternatives available to you.

The Amazon Associates Program cares about your success. We have offered a few alternative solutions to replace your aStore, which you can find below. Also, please refer to our help content in Associate Central for additional support.
aStore Feature Retirement Timeline: 

Retirement Stage	Which aStore Feature is Being Retired?	When is it Happening?
Create new aStores	Creating new aStores Duplicating new aStores from existing	July 14, 2017
Edit existing aStores	Editing existing aStores aStore ‘Invalid Product Check’ feature	August 11, 2017
Complete retirement of aStores	Access to the aStore Product page from Associate Central aStore report options from ‘Link-Type Reports’ All aStore pages redirect (or displays a link) to amazon.com	October 27, 2017

aStore Retirement Questions and Answers:
Why is Amazon retiring aStore?

1. aStore usage is very low among the associates community. Only 25% of active aStore pages actually lead to Amazon.com product sales.
2. The aStore product is not being utilized by new and experienced associates alike. New aStore creation has been stagnant the last three years, and less than half of existing aStores have been updated since 2014. Associates realize putting up sites that do little more than reorganize items from Amazon.com, does not attract or retain visitors.
3. It is proven that you earn the most with highly engaging and interactive content on your pages. aStore enables only a curated listing of Amazon products which typically means aStore sales have very little contribution to the overall sales generated by associate links.
4. There is no meaningful way to weave content around the lists created using aStore.
5. aStore has not shown monetization gain for associates. The initial click takes your visitors to a product page within the aStore and does not set the session cookie. This means your visitor could land on the aStore to visit and browse but not get attribution to generate fees.
6. aStore pages are not search engine friendly. They are treated like ad widgets by search engines therefore do not help the site to gain rankings.
7. aStore pages are not responsive and does not render well on various mobile devices.

What would the aStore retirement mean?
Once the aStore product is retired, the aStore pages will no longer be accessible and the links to these pages will redirect to amazon.com. If the aStore page was embedded in a page, the amazon.com link would be shown in place of the aStore.

Do I lose all the traffic that is presently directed to the aStore pages? 
No. The aStore links, after retirement, will redirect to Amazon.com. If you decide to migrate your aStore traffic to another product centric page, you will need to replace the existing links with links to the respective new pages

I am an Associate and part of the Amazon Influencer Program. Does the retirement of the aStore feature affect my influencer page on Amazon?
No, your influencer landing page will not be impacted by the retirement of the aStore feature.

Are there any alternatives that I could use to display a curated list of products?

1. Product Links – Link to specific products on amazon.com and display information about that product. You can build customized text links, text and image links, and image only links to Amazon products. Text + Image product links are a great option for displaying a curated list of products. They can be ingested into a page with a modest development effort. These pages would need to be hosted by you.
2. Site Stripe – The quickest and easiest way to link to any page on Amazon is to use your Associates SiteStripe. The SiteStripe toolbar will appear at the top of every page you visit on Amazon if you are logged in to Amazon using your same Amazon account as you use for Associates. To build a link to a page with the SiteStripe, simply go to the page you want on Amazon and click the ‘Get Link: Text’ button on the SiteStripe. It’s that simple.
3. Native Shopping Ads – Custom ad type of Native Shopping Ads can be used to easily create a custom curated list of handpicked products without much programming effort. The ad unit is managed through configuration on Associates Central. You can easily ingest the ad unit into their product centric pages with relevant content.  More than one unit can be ingested on a page as well, if required. Native Shopping Ads are mobile friendly and render seamlessly across devices and screen sizes. Unlike aStore pages, which are hosted by Amazon, the pages that have Native Shopping Ads integrated will be hosted by you, and you will have complete control of optimizing the pages for search engine friendliness.
4. WordPress Plugin – The WordPress Plugin for Amazon can quickly add Amazon product links to your WordPress posts and pages. The product links can be simple text links, thumbnail images, full-size images, complex templates or full-blown Amazon flash widgets

If you have any further questions, please contact Amazon Associates Customer Service

I hope this information will make you the necessary adjustment for your website. I know I am updating few of our own website projects. If you have alternative solutions to share, please share with us.

Thank you.

Image by coffeebeanworks pixabay