Amazon launches new mp3 preview widget

Amazon.com recently introduced a cool way to promote it’s DRM free iTunes competitor, the MP3 clips widget. Bloggers who are amazon associates can now post 30 second previews of music they are talking about (or best sellers on the amazon mp3 store or all music from a genre or songs they recently purchased). This adds to amazon’s already extensive suite of widget type ads offered to associates.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Text Amazon to buy it

In what is a giant leap in it’s mobile-commerce offerings, Amazon launched “Amazon TextBuyIt” yesterday - Something that will let customers find, and make purchases via something as simple as text messages.

“With today’s launch of TextBuyIt, any Amazon.com customer can now use any mobile device to shop and buy from Amazon.com, at anytime, anywhere they are”

How, Simply text a message to “AMAZON” (262966), with the name of the product (or UPC/ISBN, if you have those), search results - with product name, a single digit code, and prices - are immediately texted back to your phone. Reply to amazon’s reply with the single digit code amazon sent for the product that is to be purchased. That’s it! If it’s the first time you’re using the number to buy something you are asked your amazon.com account details from where amazon picks up your shipping and billing info, and calls you up to confirm the order)

There is a discussion going on here about the new service, the first few reviews seem positive. One of the comments made me think, we’re already into the ‘future’. “Imagine when you are wandering inside a BestBuy or circuitCity Store and really like some item and begin to wonder if you will find a better deal on Amazon… well, now you can just send an SMS and Voila!”

More on Text Buy It:
FAQs
Press Release

Update: Discussion also at Techcrunch

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Amazon EC2

Amazon’s EC2 servers get more usable for smaller web developers with static ip addresses now available, Elastic IP Addresses -> Amazon

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Social Shop on Facebook with Amazon’s latest apps

It’s the social-shopping week, it seems. I already wrote about two new social shopping apps on facebook that launched this week. Now, it’s e-retail giant Amazon’s turn to get facebook users to social-shop.

“By combining Amazon’s vast selection of products with Facebook’s millions of users, we are able to make activities like gift-giving more efficient and rewarding for Facebook users.”

In a news release earlier today, Amazon announced the launch of two new facebook applications - Giver and Grapevine. “Giver” lets users view their friends’ Amazon wishlists and share their own, “Grapewine” populates the user’s facebook feed with their activity on amazon.com (one gets choose what type of activity to share upon signing up).

“Use Amazon Giver to let your Facebook friends know and buy what you wish for, as well as gift suggestions, and Amazon Grapevine to show your friends what you’ve been up to on Amazon.com, such as writing Customer Reviews, adding items to your Wish List, and tagging products”

It would have been even more awesome if amazon had somehow added an affiliate marketing element to their facebook suite of apps. Say, if someone buys something on your wishlist by clicking on it - for someone else - you get the standard amazon associates revenue-share on the sale credited to your affiliate account. something like that would boost their apps’ usage and make social-shopping recommendations on facebook a lot more fun.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Amazon adds more features to widgets

Since launching affiliate widgets in september last year, Amazon announced today that affliates have created over 200,000 of these nifty web 2.0 marketing small-wonders already.

“Many of you came back with great suggestions and we’ve picked the most requested features and implemented them in this release.”

Amazon also announced today the addition of various new features that are being added to associate widgets starting today. Some of these new features include:

• Shuffle Products: While building ‘My Favorites’ and ‘Slideshow’ widgets, associates can now select the Shuffle Products option to show your products in random order each time the widget is displayed. one can also go to My Widgets and enable this option in previously saved widgets
• Default Search Term: With the new ‘Use default search term’ option in the Search widget you can specify a search term that will be used to populate the Search widget when it is first displayed. Remember, you can always add a default search term to previously saved widgets by going to My Widgets and editing your saved Search widgets
• Delete Widgets: Is your My Widgets page cluttered with widgets that you no longer use? Use the delete icon besides each widget on the My Widgets page to permanently delete unused widgets
• Tracking Ids: Monitoring your widgets with custom Tracking Ids has never been easier. You can now easily change the tracking id associated with each widget by locating the widget on My Widgets and clicking the change link in the Tracking Id column.

Power to affiliate widgetry!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Amazon acquiring Audible?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!