Comparison: Amazon Associates Affiliate Store Scripts

There are a variety of good Amazon affiliate store scripts available. They range in price from FREE to pretty expensive. Some have monthly or annual subscription fees, while others are just a one time fee for a license.

I will cover the features and differences between them, as well as I can, but it is up to you as to which one is the best.

Which one do you think will work the best for you?

For those that do not know, an Amazon Associate store script is typically a script that is written in PHP.

You would buy a hosting plan (shared, VPS, dedicated, etc), which could be as low as $4.95 per month, and then you would buy one or several domain names. Next you install the script. Follow whatever guides have been written for it, load your products, design the layout, and run a store.

In virtually every sense of the word you could have the look and feel of a normal store. However, in this case, you may not store and ship any of the products listed.

You are a "middle man". You collect a commission on the sale, which may or may not be small, but they add up. You can make a nice amount of money, on an ongoing basis, from these storefronts that you maintain.

The Value that Your Store Provides to the Customer

You are providing a service to the customer. You are not simply collecting money. If you create a store that is nothing more than a bunch of affiliate links, your store would be viewed as a "thin affiliate" by Google, which is a bad thing.

Think about what would help your customer, and provide it.

1. Your store can and should help the customer find a product, via your careful organization and categorization of your products.
   
2. You can talk about and review the various products.
3. Your store could have a blog, FAQ, forum, provide tips and suggestions, etc.

Amazon Associates Program

If you have not already signed up.  It's free.

Associate-O-Matic is one of the oldest and most established Amazon store scripts. It is well-respected and has many benefits, but like many things has some weaknesses.

Associate-O-Matic

Features:

1. Simple Install Setup
2. Generous Licensing
3. $99 first year, $20 subscription per year
4. Supports Multiple Amazon locations, including US, UK, CA, DE, FR and JP
5. Web-Based Admin Control Panel, with 250+ settings
6. Home Page Customization, choose from 7 different home page formats
7. Hundreds of Categories & Subcategories from Amazon
8. Customize the colors, fonts, images and layout of your store
9. Powerful Search Tool
10. In-Depth Product Info, including item attributes
11. Built-In Cart, keeps visitors on your site until checkout at Amazon (Full Version)
12. SEO Settings, optimize your store for better search engine ranking
13. RSS Support, including external RSS Feeds
14. WordPress Plug-In Support, products can be displayed in blog posts, so that your blog readers can buy from your store

Affiliate Niche Script a really interesting affiliate store script and provides some very innovative features, such as mobile device capability and other affiliates than Amazon.

Affiliate Niche Script

Features:

1. SEO Friendly URLs
2. Custom Page Titles, Meta Descriptions & Keywords
3. Built-in Product tracking
4. Built-in Cart tracking Price Tracking, notify customers about price changes
5. Amazon Auto Suggest, as customer uses the built-in search engine and type letters in to the search box, the store will query Amazon for keywords and present the customer with suggestions (similar to the Google Suggest feature).
6. AJAX Shopping Cart
7. AJAX Pages
8. Banners / Ads Management
9. Static Page Management
10. Custom template themes
11. Members Area, allows customers to bookmark products, use the price tracking feature, and write reviews, etc.
12. iPhone Support, the store can display on iPhones.
13. Google Adsense integration
14. Ebay capable
15. One install with multiple domains, easier to manage
    
16. Leased License. $14.95 Monthly Payment
17. Owned License. $99 One Time Payment.
    

The Amazon Products Feed script has one special quality. It is free. You may also really like it's built-in features, especially when you consider the cost.

Amazon Products Feed

Features:

1. Free, yes it's free.
2. Easy to set up.
3. Simple, the script requires that Perl be installed on your web host server.
4. Cross-platform capable, this script runs on both Linux/Apache and Windows/IIS.Flexible
5. Customizable - change the look and feel of the results through simple HTML template files.
6. Established - thousands of web sites are currently running their own Web store with this script.
   
7. Multilingual, running on stores in English, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese. You can change the language by editing a simple text file.
8. The Amazon store works with US, Uk, DE, JP, CA, FR.
9. Scalable, meaning you can change a setting to increase or decrease the cache size to trade between speed and disk space.
10. Suggestive selling, all of the searches are automatically cross linked throughout the search results to increase the chance of sellling.
11. Fast, many users have remarked that it displays results better and faster than Amazon even.
    
12. Powerful search and browse tools.
    .

The Associate Engine script is a fairly limited script, but does have some nice features.

Associate Engine

Features:

1. Drill-down browse index
2. Bestsellers option
   
3. Includes Buy buttons
4. Multiple Template Support
5. Data Caching, for improved speed
6. Displays up to Date Prices
7. XML Driven
   
8. Support for Amazon US and UK
9. Discussion forum
   
10. 1 year of free updates
11. $24.95 for first year
12. $9.95 for each following year
    

The Fresh Store Builder is a modern, well supported design and continues to evolve with further enhancements. It is more expensive, initially, than some of the others, but there are no subscription fees. The profits are all yours.

Fresh Store Builder

Features:

1. Complete Control, you set up your own categories and sub-categories.
2. 100% Automated, products and related information updates automatically
3. SEO-friendly Design
4. Uses AJAX, which is the modern, flexible language in which it is built
5. No Programming Needed
6. Supports US, UK, and DE Amazon locales, all others coming soon
7. Powerful Search and Browsing
8. No Subscription Fees
9. Google Analytics Integration
10. Your Own Shopping Basket, which connects directly with Amazon Checkout when customer is ready to purchase
11. Private Forum and Support Resources
12. Several License Packages Available
13. $97, for three store licenses
    

Comparison of Amazon Associates Affiliate Store Scripts