Amazon’s Cloud Marketing Is Affiliate Marketing 2.0

Amazon revolutionized Internet marketing by putting affiliate marketing on the map back in 1996, turning every little mom-and-pop website into a revenue channel for Amazon.  Today Amazon has turned to cloud marketing as the new and improved 2.0 version of affiliate marketing.  Amazon is using cloud computing to boost revenues by giving software and website developers easy, open access to their internal systems, encouraging them to develop new technology on top of Amazon’s systems that will drive new revenue channels for Amazon.

Amazon offers yet another example of how cloud marketing is changing the nature of marketing on the Internet.  Instead of the classic model of driving traffic to the Amazon site and then converting that traffic, Amazon is increasingly bypassing the need for traffic and conversion altogether by driving revenues directly into their business through cloud-based APIs and configurable widgets.

The original Amazon affiliate marketing program made it easy for anyone with a website to create a link to any of Amazon’s products and earn a commission check for site visitors who clicked through the link to Amazon’s site and bought the product.

Today, the Amazon affiliate marketing program now offers website owners a chance to keep their visitors on their own site while still selling Amazon’s products.  The newly released Amazon aStore now lets website owners embed Amazon’s entire shopping cart functionality directly in their own websites.  With aStore, a website owner can now attract site visitors, show them a wide variety of Amazon products, process their credit card and complete their purchase on-line without the visitor ever leaving the site to go to Amazon’s site.

Affiliates can also embed a variety of highly interactive widgets on their websites that will make product recommendations, search Amazon’s product inventory, showcase hot deals or just promote the site owner’s personal wishlist.

Amazon even offers a Product Advertising API that lets developers build their own custom software and websites integrated directly into Amazon’s back end systems.  Developers can tap into Amazon’s database of products, sellers and reviews.  They can even code their applications to interface with Amazon’s search and shopping cart functionality.

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