My Online Life: Exploring the Amazon

I thought I'd share with you some of my recent explorations around the internet. This week, it's Amazon. The four ways I use Amazon, the last two of which were attempts to make some money, which aren't exactly going so well, but no reason you can't save yourself the bother or do something slightly more successful with my efforts!

1. Buying 

The obvious one, but a few ways of using it to save you some money. Firstly, if you are a student, work at a uni or are alumni, then you probably qualify for an NUS Extra card. £10 a year and gives you a 5% discount on most stuff at Amazon.

There are also clever ways of searching Amazon for bargains, a useful list of techniques on MoneySavingExpert.

2. WishListing

"What should I buy Archie for his birthday?" I always have the answer to that, as I maintain Amazon wishlists for everyone in the family, which makes it easy to keep track of the things they want and easy to email out a (perma-)link to the family.

Here's is Archie's (age nearly 8) list.

3. Making Money 1

Mechanical Turk. I love the idea of this, but in fact my time is too valuable to commit to this.

The idea is to give you an easy way to get a real-human workforce to do tedious work for you, and pay a few cents per piece of work. This is typical:

I've dipped in and out of this over the past year, and having given a few evenings of my life to slightly better paying tasks (like writing descriptions or articles) I've managed nearly $16. The frustrating thing you'll see from my account report, is that sometimes your work is rejected.

Then after all this you have gift credit on Amazon.com, which I haven't figured out how to use yet as they don't ship internationally. D'oh.

4. Making Money 2

The other way to make money is to become an associate, and basically drive sales traffic to Amazon for them. The most common way this is done, which you'll see if you are reading this post on my blog directly, is to included context relevant ads on your own websites. At the time of writing, Amazon has decided an ad for hoover bags is the most relevant context. Hmmm.

For each sale resulting from a click through I provided, I get paid 5%. The most success I've had with this so far (ok, the ONLY success) is when I tweeted about a book I was reading, and remembered to use an associate link for the book:

I had 51 direct clicks to Amazon from the link, which converted into one sale, for which I earned 20p. Have tried doing this with a few more books, and although the clicks are going up, still not exactly a millionaire...

I have also been exploring Amazon's 'aStore' (still part of the associate scheme). By curating your own list of items for sale you can quickly and easily create and maintain your own online store. Here's my store: http://www.hard-to-shop-for.co.uk My only expense here was an evening to put this together (90% of which was spent trying to find stuff to put in the categories) and a few pounds for a domain name.

I like the idea that by maintaining lists (which as you can see from number 2 on this list I like doing anyway!) I can have a website out there that might bring in a few pounds with little effort. Ok, maybe pounds is optimistic - I'll let you know if I ever do reach a whole pound in commission! 

I hope there are some ideas there for you to try doing a bit more with Amazon. I enjoyed the exploration anyway!