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| Who is John Galt? (And would he be okay if I resold this book?) |
Last year, I became interested in Amazon's web services. AWS provides access to Amazon's catalog, reviews and prices. It's neat stuff, but to make any money, you'll also need Associates. I spent a week building a simple, but butt-ugly web store.
My conclusion: their web services are very cool as a concept, but suffer from three pretty huge problems:
- The development time is cost effective only if you've got a lot of traffic to your site. I had a basic store working, but it's not worth my time to continue refining it because I'm well past ever breaking even. Alan Taylor has had more success with his Amazon Light, earning about $10k in the two years since his site's been online. He's put much more effort into his site, and is deservedly seeing some benefit.
- Amazon's catalog has a lot of crap in it. Here's an example using my web services hook into the biography books section. The first 50+ entries have publication dates well out into the future. For example, the third book says 2030, which seems to be a typo. My code has its own issues, but this is just reporting their data. For comparison, here's one of the items as shown on Amazon directly.
- Not all of the product lines are accessible via web services. And even then, I wouldn't get paid if I directed someone to a pair of jeans at Lands' End. I love to cook and had hoped to call out specific foodstuffs, but at the time, they didn't support it the gourmet food store. It may work now, but I've kind of lost interest.
When Adsense can't find a matching ad, such is the case for several of my pages, it serves up a message for a non-profit like the March of Dimes, The Carter Center or UNICEF.
Thank you whomever has been clicking on the ads! It's generating enough to buy me one tall double espresso mocha a month. Perfect for the aspiring writer when NaNoWriMo month rolls around in November. In the meantime, I will no doubt blow this on books at Amazon.
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