Sisterly Savings

One of the most recent ventures I added to SS was the addition of an Amazon.com store to our site. Its a paid affiliate where I make a percentage off each purchase someone makes. After the initial set up of the store, it doesn’t take much time at all to maintain and is a fairly easy way to earn some money on products that you know and/or recommend!

With the Amazon.com aStore,you can literally build a web store in minutes and have it customized to look like your blog/site. I especially like the fact that you can even “hand pick” which items you would like to see in your store. The products are items sold through amazon.com. You can even set up categories and write little blurbs about products that you highly recommend! There’s also a widget that you can create and add to your website to promote the listings you have in your store.

To start, you 1st need to sign up to be approved for the Amazon.com Associates Program here.

Once approved, here are the next steps to building your very own online web store:

Go to your home page, it will look like this:

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On the left hand side of the Page, there are Tools, scroll to AStore.

There are 5 Subtitles to aStore:

1. Category Page: Where you will create each page in your store with 3 options to choose from to select your products
2. Color & Design: Customize the look and feel of your store by selecting the color theme, specifying your store title and including a link to your logo. The logo will appear next to the store title.
3. Side Bar Widgets: Specify sidebar placement and select which widgets you would like to display for each page type. Adding widgets to a page provides your visitors with useful content and an opportunity for you to expand your aStore selection.
4. Get Links: This is when your store has been been published, you Will be provided a link to your aStore
5. aStore Widgets: With aStore widgets, you can display products from your aStore by  copy & paste

Now you will Select category pages which then will bring up  Your aStore – Settings

Choose Enable a link back to my site in the navigation and place your website URL in the field. This will allow a link to be placed in the store back to your Site!

Click Continue…. You’ll be brought to this page:

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From this page, you’ll be able to fully customize the look, feel & color of your store to match your Home Page to your Blog. You’ll also name your store on this page and make your Header.

Once you’ve customized the look, click continue… at which point you’ll be brought to the Widgets page:

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On this page, you’ll choose how you would like the sidebar placed in your store as well as choose what extra widgets you would like placed on the page. Browse around and try the Pre View Feature to see how your Store looks!

Once you’ve finished this step, click Finish & Get Link.

At this point you’ll be offered 3 choices as to how you would like to link your store to your site: ( I use stand Alone)

• Simple link to my store as a standalone site. Learn more
• Embed my store using an in-line frame.
• Embed my store using a frameset.

You now have your aStore all set up, but you still need to “Stock” it with some items!

To “Stock” Items:

Go back to Main Page and select Category Pages.

Click Add Category Page: You can make a Category Such as Recipes for example:

•  Note- You can place anything related to your category in your store such as books, product items, movies, etc. For the sake of making it simple, I’m just going to add Recipe Books for Kids in this store.

Once you’ve named your category, now you will select how you want add items.

There are 3 ways to do this:

1. Add Individual products
2. Add by category
3. Add from a Listmania List

I personally prefer to hand pick my own items that i want to display. So that’s what we will choose for our example.

Select Add Individual Products from drop Down Menu, then Click Add products. You’ll be taken to a screen like this:

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Click on Search bar to view a selection of categories to choose from. Since my category is Recipes and I want to add Kids Recipes, I am choosing Books as my category and I will type in “KIds”f as my keyword. Click Go.

In the Box all the items that match your selection will come up. Now you can select a product that you would like to list in your store by simply clicking on the add button.

You’ll now see it placed on the sidebar. At this point,  you can click on the image to edit its details or to remove it.

*Also, if you are looking for a specific Brand,Type or Logo, say Disney Books for example, you can add that to the search bar and a list of the items they have available will pop up.

Once you’ve added your items, just scroll down to bottom of page and click Preview.

Thats it, your Done! Repeat the same steps to add additional categories/departments to your store and have fun adding inventory! Then just add a link to your site or link to it from somewhere on your Home page:)

I know this was a tad long, but I like step by step instructions myself to better understand how to perform something. I hope it wasn’t a bit too much!

So far, I have made a small profit with the addition of our store and I hope you do too!!

If you build a store, please come back and leave us a link here so that we can visit!