Amazon Chooser Plugin Enhancements pt 1

[gwilsonmail]

The current amazon plugin that is available in the editor is great - it saved me a lot of time.

However, it's can only target one amazon country-based store (.ca, .com, .de, etc). The selection of the country to purchase books etc from is not the blog owners to make! That decision resides with the reader/purchaser.

I would like to suggest an enhancement or a new plugin where the reader can select (from a drop-down or radio button) the amazon store they wish to use.

The existing amazon chooser plugin (once modified) would make use of this choice and point the links to the most appropriate store.

This brings up an issue that the blog owner would have to register at all the different stores, which is very time consuming. This is not necessary, since if the blog owner does not have an id at a particular country store the link should still be made. The blog owner would receive no credit, but the blog reader would be happy because they could link directly and make a convenient purchase.

The php code to make all this happen has already been written, but not as a s9y plugin. Check out - http://www.chipdir.nl/amazon/ taking a look at the amazon.php or amazonv4.php for the idea. The code also supports language choice, which I also think would be useful given the fact that the reader's preferred language might not be english but we can at least present some of the website info to the reader in their language and this option would work automatically based on the readers choice.

For full credit I got that link through this other useful amazon affiliate site at http://www.associate-advocate.websbywes ... cripts.htm

Implementing for AWS 4 would be the best choice since the country selection is (simply ) a few changes to the URL to make it domain specific, unlike previous versions

Sadly I can change a line or two of php to my liking but cannot implement this one!

Any takers?

[caw]

However, it's can only target one amazon country-based store (.ca, .com, .de, etc). The selection of the country to purchase books etc from is not the blog owners to make! That decision resides with the reader/purchaser.

Eh? As the referring associate, it most certainly is the blog owner's choice to make. If somebody wants to buy a book from a different store that's certainly his or her choice, but the blog owner doesn't have to make it easy for them to do so.

This brings up an issue that the blog owner would have to register at all the different stores, which is very time consuming. This is not necessary, since if the blog owner does not have an id at a particular country store the link should still be made. The blog owner would receive no credit, but the blog reader would be happy because they could link directly and make a convenient purchase.

I don't see the advantage to this from the blog owner's/associate's perspective. The whole point of registering to make referrals is to get credit for the potential sale and generate revenue.

Perhaps I'm just misunderstanding the goal.

Curtis.

[gwilsonmail]

my point was simply that as the blogger you don't have to register at every amazon site for the plugin to work.

If you force a .de reader to purchase at amazon.com you will most likely have lost the sale anyway. They'll just take the asin and manually purchase at amazon.de - you lose teh sale and perhaps lose a blog reader due to the inconvenience.

Since this is optional and no different to what exists now it's academic

[mgroeninger]

I would like to suggest an enhancement or a new plugin where the reader can select (from a drop-down or radio button) the amazon store they wish to use.

I don't see anyway to implement this from a UI perspective. You would have to use a sidebar plugin to display a dropdown and either use javascript to render the url dynamically as the user changes the selection, or use a redirect page.

Neither way is very simple.

I also happen to agree with caw that it is the blog owner's choice for which store to send them to. But that is mostly because I don't generate any revenue from amazon on my website.