Amazon Associates offers RSS feeds
Howard Lake | 22 October 2008 | Blogs
If your charity generates income as an Amazon Associate by earning a commission from selling books, DVDs etc on your website, then there is another tool available to make it even easier for you to do so.
In July 2008 Amazon explained how Associates can create RSS feeds of the latest and best-selling content and tag them all with their Associate ID to ensure they are credited with a percentage of any sales.
On the Amazon Associate blog you can read step-by-step ./guidance on how to create the code for feeds that are relevant to your online audience.
At the moment you can choose from the following feeds:
* Bestsellers of various Categories
* Bestsellers of Sub-Categories
* New Releases
* Most gifted Products
* Most Wished For Products
UK Fundraising is using this tool to publish a list of the bestselling and future releases of books about Web Marketing:
www.fundraising.co.uk/aggregator/sources/71
As you’ll see, cover image, title, author, price, rating, and publication date are all imported automatically. Even better, the content is updated hourly by Amazon.
There are a few feeds that would be useful which don’t seem to be available yet such as feeds for a search term e.g. latest books about ‘fundraising’, or books by a particular author. But the available RSS feeds are more than enough to be getting on with.
If you don’t know about Amazon Associates yet, then I encourage you to find out more. Since 1996 (yes, 12 years ago), any website owner has been able to earn a percentage of any sales generated by lists of Amazon items on its site. Few make large sums with this, but given how many of your supporters buy books, DVDs, electrical equipment, toys, shoes etc, imagine earning a small percentage on just some of that expenditure.
https://associates.amazon.co.uk/gp/flex/associates/apply-login.html
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.