“Hi,This is a little brief about me. Mainly in an attempt to test Amazon Context Links. I am a computer software developer, love programming and all computer geek stuff. I usually program in Java, PHP, and right now going into Ruby on Rails. I am also a gamer… without proper time to play all the games I want. My game of all time is no other than Monkey Island. Adventure games is my favorite genre, though for some time we have lacked some real good games. It’s coming back now with Telltale games, Ankh Reverse the Curse, Syberia, Broken Sword and others. Action/Adventure game is another type I love. Prince of Persia and Beyond Good and Evil are what made me Ubisoft fan. As for 3rd person shooter, Mafia is a game that can be as good as GodFather if made a movie.

Away from the computer, if you ever find me, I like reading. There are many great books out there, cheap and so rich and useful. Book about habits of effective people, 7 habits of highly effective people. Don’t sweat the small stuff is another very simple, yet very effective book I enjoyed. Google Hacks and Spidering Hacks are two other books (for geeks) that I enjoyed a lot. If you are into biography, or inspiration, read about the life of the richest man on earth, and how he started an evolution. Bill Gates and the making of the microsoft empire could be the best book i’ve ever read. You learn quite a lot about Bill him self, how he made his fortune, how he made it, and why everyone is out there after him. It is also very inspiring. Bill him self wrote a not so bad at all book about Business running at the speed of thought.”

At the time of writing, the page had four links to Amazon generated automatically only, namely Bill Gates, Amazon Context, Prince of Persia, and Monkey Island. One of which, Prince of Persia, only was pointing where I wanted it. Monkey Island pointed to a book instead of the game, so the script does not have intelligence to determine what kind of content I am talking about. Bill Gates linked to a book other than the on I have hoped for, but that’s OK. You can see however that all the other intended items: Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Ankh Reverse the Curse, Syberia, Broken Sword, Beyond Good and Evil, GodFather (Can you believe that!), 7 habits of highly effective people, Google Hacks, Spidering Hacks, and Bill Gates and the making of the microsoft empire, all did not generate any hyperlinks, while most of them are highly rated items on Amazon. I assume it’s intentional not to overload the page with affiliate links, but it’s causing me to lose the items I want linked. 1 only out of the 14 items I wanted was properly linked, another was linked to undesired content. To sum it up, below are the Pros & Cons of the service:

Pros:

- Automatically embed affiliate links in the article without need of manual intervention. Could increase sales traffic.

Cons:

- Slight delay in page final loading time. For large pages, this might be an issue as well.

- Annoyance for end user, as all links open floating window with product description.

- Credibility loss: As users gets used to affiliate links in the site, he will ignore the real related links.

- Loss of desired links: Unless you link the specific desired products to Amazon manually, you may lose your intended links.

With all of this in hand, I think I will stick to manual linking to the items I want instead. Your experience as a publisher or end user on this is mostly welcomed.

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I haven’t wasted much time and have given it a try already. You can feel free to browse my Amazon store here. If you like it, and you are a site owner, you can become an Amazon associate and create one yourself.

Having tested it however, the product is still new and in some occasions not so flexible. For example, I have to either pick every item I want to show, or provide keywords for a specific category. You cannot have the two, which is really a shame. You would normally want to post your favorite 10 items, and expect 10 more to come as recommendation from Amazon itself. aStore does provide a section for similar items, but its limited size only and does not fulfill the above situation. The store administration side response time and usability also have a great area for improvement, with some proper AJAX implementation in place. Creating my store took so much idle time waiting for server response and refresh pages. This whole waiting time could get eliminated by applying AJAX to add items and delete them dynamically without requiring any refreshes.

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