The Amazon Associates Program retired the aStore product on October 27, 2017 and aStore pages no longer earn referral commisions. Please find additional detail, as well as key dates and alternatives available to you.

The Amazon Associates Program cares about your success. We have offered a few alternative solutions which you can find below. Also, please refer to our help content in Associate Central for additional support.

aStore Feature Retirement Timeline:  

aStore Retirement Questions and Answers:
Why did Amazon retire aStore?

1. aStore usage was very low among the associates community. Only 25% of active aStore pages actually led to Amazon.com product sales.

1. The aStore product was not being utilized by new and experienced associates alike. New aStore creation has been stagnant the last three years, and less than half of existing aStores have been updated since 2014. Associates realize putting up sites that do little more than reorganize items from Amazon.com, does not attract or retain visitors.

1. It is proven that you earn the most with highly engaging and interactive content on your pages. aStore enabled only a curated listing of Amazon products which typically meant aStore sales had very little contribution to the overall sales generated by associate links.

1. There was no meaningful way to weave content around the lists created using aStore.

1. aStore did not shown monetization gain for associates. The initial click took your visitors to a product page within the aStore and did not set the session cookie. This meant your visitor could land on the aStore to visit and browse but not get attribution to generate commissions.

1. aStore pages were not search engine friendly. They were treated like ad widgets by search engines therefore did not help the site to gain rankings.

1. aStore pages were not responsive and did not render well on various mobile devices.

What does the aStore retirement mean?
Since aStore was retired, the aStore pages are no longer accessible and the links to these pages will redirect to amazon.com. If the aStore page was embedded in a page, the amazon.com link is shown in place of the aStore.

Do I lose all the traffic that was previously directed to the aStore pages?
No. The aStore links now redirect to Amazon.com. If you decided to migrate your aStore traffic to another product centric page, you will need to replace the existing links with links to the respective new pages, if you haven't already done so.

I am an Associate and part of the Amazon Influencer Program. Does the retirement of the aStore feature affect my influencer page on Amazon?
No, your influencer landing page is not be impacted by the retirement of the aStore feature.

Are there any alternatives that I could use to display a curated list of products?

1. Product Links – Link to specific products on amazon.com and display information about that product. You can build customized text links, text and image links, and image only links to Amazon products. Text + Image product links are a great option for displaying a curated list of products. They can be ingested into a page with a modest development effort. These pages would need to be hosted by you.
2. Site Stripe - The quickest and easiest way to link to any page on Amazon is to use your Associates SiteStripe. The SiteStripe toolbar will appear at the top of every page you visit on Amazon if you are logged in to Amazon using your same Amazon account as you use for Associates. To build a link to a page with the SiteStripe, simply go to the page you want on Amazon and click the 'Get Link: Text' button on the SiteStripe. It's that simple.
3. Native Shopping Ads - Custom ad type of Native Shopping Ads can be used to easily create a custom curated list of handpicked products without much programming effort. The ad unit is managed through configuration on Associates Central. You can easily ingest the ad unit into their product centric pages with relevant content. More than one unit can be ingested on a page as well, if required. Native Shopping Ads are mobile friendly and render seamlessly across devices and screen sizes. Unlike aStore pages, which are hosted by Amazon, the pages that have Native Shopping Ads integrated will be hosted by you, and you will have complete control of optimizing the pages for search engine friendliness.
4. Wordpress Plugin – The Wordpress Plugin for Amazon can quickly add Amazon product links to your WordPress posts and pages. The product links can be simple text links, thumbnail images, full-size images, complex templates or full-blown Amazon flash widgets

If you have any further questions, please contact Amazon Associates Customer Service