Amazon takes a cue from Chitika's eMiniMalls?

As a book author, I've been a longtime member of the Amazon Associates program, which effectively doubles the per-book royalty I get if someone buys one of my books through one of my Amazon affiliate links. (Like the one you see at the bottom of each posting here.)

Today, Amazon announced that they're beta testing a new feature called “product previews”. Product previews transform ordinary Amazon referral links, the ones that look like this:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321321146/ericgiguerecom

Into JavaScript-enhanced product links. Hover over one of these links and you'll see an inline popup window like this one appear:

The popup disappears when you move off the link.

Not everyone will see this. During the beta test period, Amazon will randomly enable or disable the feature for visitors to a given site. If you don't see the feature in your own browser, try deleting the cookie called “amazon_vf” from your browser's cookie cache and refreshing the page. You may have to do this a few times. (Firefox users, here's how you do it: Choose “Options…” from the “Tools” menu, then click on the “Privacy” icon on the left of the dialog. Expand the “Cookies” item in the right hand pane and click the “View Cookies” button. In the resulting dialog, click the “Cookie Name” header to sort the cookie list by name, select the “amazon_vf” cookie and press “Remove Cookie” to get rid of it.)

Note that these product previews do not happen automatically, the website owner has to paste in a little bit of JavaScript code near the bottom of the page. The JavaScript runs through the page after it's been loaded and changes the standard Amazon links into these new “enhanced” links.

I'm not sure I'm going to use this feature or not, it is a bit intrusive, but I'll give it a go for a few days. Amazon may drop this feature after the beta if it doesn't pan out well for them.

What I find really interesting about this feature is that it's very similar to the concept of Chitika's eMiniMalls units, which basically display more detailed information about a product, although the eMiniMalls units are displayed right in the page.

Note pop-ups are allowed by the AdSense program policies as long as they don't interfere with navigation or obscure Google ads, so my interpretation is that this feature is safe to use on AdSense pages.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!

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