Amazon Product Ads begins rollout

Back in July, I mentioned a job posting over at Amazon about Product Ads, a previously-unknown program having something to do with "a new cost-per-click advertising channel."  Now it looks like this program has rolled out based upon email marketing performed by Amazon, as well as some early examples in Consumer Electronics, Home & Garden, Tools Toys and Kids & Babies categories.

Here's how the flow works:

• Merchant uploads product catalog
• Customers perform searches on Amazon.com, where the merchant's products appear in search results next to Amazon products (also known as "the product ad")
• Customers may click on the product ad, which takes the user to Amazon's product page presentation, which links directly to the merchant's OWN product page
• The merchant is charged on a CPC basis
• The merchant keeps all transaction revenue from the referral, minus CPC costs

Check out an example search here. Notice the "Available at external website" footer label on each "product ad."

So, what does this accomplish? It brings visibility to third-party merchants up one layer into the search results themselves.  Previously, as we all know, merchants could only be seen once a user clicked onto a product page. Now, third-party merchants can compete directly within Amazon's search results, depending on the product and category.

This will probably benefit merchants who sell more unique items, but the data will always tell the truth.

Anyone out there enrolled as a beta in the program?  Talk to me! scott.hurff at channeladvisor dot com

Thanks to Max & Brian for some information.

Comments

[Corey Creed]

I got in earlier today. I posted some information about how it works at http://www.thejunglemap.com/post/186 if you want to check it out.

[Dan Shields]

We have been participating since December. A couple things that are frustrating are the amount of products we get errors with and are not activated. Amazon seems to be very strict on their feeds but many times the errors don't seem correct and working with the rep hasn't been that much help on figuring the issues out.

The biggest problem so far is you have to manually upload your feed. There isn't a way to have your feed automatically upload if you have like 20 or so sites. The rep explained that we can do something with SOAP and XML but I haven't been able to get our engineers to put it as priority.

Other then that the ROI has been spectacular, maybe because we were the only ones doing it for our category of products. I'm sure it will be different now.