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Our Rating
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We have to tell you, Fresh Store Builder has rapidly become one of our favorite pieces of software. We had given up our personal Amazon affiliate store, because we were so frustrated with our options for building a really outstanding Amazon store. And then we found Fresh Store Builder – and WOW!
Not only can you create a beautiful store, but the folks at Fresh Store Builder just nailed every feature we could ever want to ensure our Amazon affiliate store had unique content and was perfectly situated for some intense SEO. Let’s jump into the review, and we’ll tell you how we fell in love 
Features
Let’s start with the most important feature – you have complete control over the product descriptions for every single product in your Amazon Affiliate store. Let me say that again… COMPLETE CONTROL! This is so hugely important, as you can rewrite all the copy for every product and make it 100% unique – all while remaining connected to Amazon for pricing updates, in stock status, reviews, etc. This is the key to having your products rank well in the search engines, as you won’t have the same descriptions as every other Amazon affiliate store. This was the #1 selling point for us, and it’s incredible.
The second feature that just blew us away is that you have an integrated shopping cart on Your Site! Your users can shop your store, and add products to their cart. Then, when they are ready to checkout – everything is transferred at once to Amazon, and the user clicks a button to add all your products to their Amazon shopping cart. This works flawlessly, and is so important to the purchasing flow. As an Amazon Affiliate, you know that we don’t get cookies longer than 1 day – so getting people to checkout and purchase without leaving Amazon is huge!
And the features just keep coming. The third major selling point for us was the ability to hand choose every product in our Amazon store, which is essential for creating a really focused Niche affiliate store. You don’t have to take every product in a category, and you don’t have to use Amazon’s category names. You setup your own categories, and can have as much control over your product selection as you want. If it makes sense to just important all products from a category – you can do that. But if you want to hand select, it’s as simple as adding the ASIN.
You can use Fresh Store Builder on multiple Amazon locales – UK, USA, DE (Germany), IT (Italy), JP (Japan) and more coming soon. There will be some differences in the checkout process, as at last look the Amazon API didn’t allow the same integrated shopping cart checkout as you have in the Amazon US locale for all locations.
There’s also a full content management system for you to add articles and unique content. Another hugely important factor for creating a successful Amazon affiliate store that will stand head and shoulders above the competition.
Ease of Installation
You won’t need a degree from MIT to install this software, it’s very well documented and a very fast installation. Fresh Store Builder installs just fine into a subdirectory on your site – so you could add this along with your other content. For instance, let’s say you have a niche directory with listings for companies the manufacture golf clubs. You could add an Amazon affiliate store to sell products and integrate it right into your website. Or maybe you have a restaurant directory, and want to offer an affiliate store with gourmet foods – Fresh Store Builder makes this simple.
Ease of Customization
We had to knock 1 start off – but ONLY because we are looking at this from the standpoint of a user that doesn’t program like we do. There are ton’s of customizations that you can make to the templates for your store – but there is a lack of pre-built template choices (although we’re planning to design some ourselves). There are more than enough options for you to create a store that is unique for you.
However, if you’re really after something different from the default templates, you’ll need to get into the code a bit. The good news here is that Fresh Store Builder did a great job at separating the design layer from the core code, and it’s very straight forward php and css programming. Yes, we do this for a living – but we were really pleased working with this software.
I’ll give you two comparison’s here to check out – just click on the image. The one on the left is an Amazon Affiliate Store that has been customized based on the templates provided, and they’ve done a great job to make it unique. The one on the right is the store we’re building, and you can see we’ve really taking the customization a step further to integrate into a design for our entire site. Check out both – just remember our store isn’t done yet These both open in new windows, so you can come back and keep reading our review.
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Monetization Potential
An Amazon affiliate store is all about making money, and Fresh Store Builder gets top marks here for how they’ve integrated the shopping cart features with the Amazon API. They also include “sideboxes” that you can configure in the admin for your sidebar – which can contain content or html. So you can add affiliate banners, google adsense, etc. – really nice additions to monetize more than just your Amazon store offerings.
The other strong feature for making money is the ability to custom craft your own product descriptions and information. Since the Amazon affiliate cookie only lasts 24 hours – you need to pre-sell your visitors so they are ready to make that purchase when they get to Amazon’s site. The best way to do that is with personalized content, and as you can see on our Wisely Organic site we are using the tabbed sections to give more information on every product. Get all the “researching” there for the consumer, so they are all set to buy. An outstanding implementation by the development team.
SEO Optimization
Once again, complete control is where Fresh Store Builder shines. For every Category, every Product, every single static page – you have control over SEO. The page urls, the page title, meta descriptions and keywords – you are able to customize this all to truly fine tune the SEO for your Amazon store. Huge win here for us Amazon affiliates, and one you simply must take the time to setup for maximum results.
Support is built in for Rich Snippets (microdata, microformats, RDFa), as well as integrated Google Analytics and automatic XML sitemaps. The Fresh Store Builder team really focused on all the tools you need for SEO Optimization.
Conclusion
Fresh Store Builder is the must-have Amazon affiliate store software. When you look at all the features, the control you have over content – and then add in 100% Open Source and the ability to create unlimited stores with no monthly fees, this is a sure winner. If you have been waiting to build your Amazon affiliate store – don’t wait any longer, start building your store!
Fresh Store Builder – Amazon Affiliate Store
Price: $147
