Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

We’ve just received our first payment as an Amazon Associate. It has to be said that the amount won’t have a major impact on IndigoBlue’s bottom line, but we don’t really count ourselves as a bookshop. We provide links to Amazon for books that we mention in blog posts or the subjects of book reviews, really to make it easier for our website users. If someone wants more details on a book it’s much easier to provide them with a link rather than them having to copy the book title, open up another browser tab, paste the title in, find the right link in the search result, etc…

Given that we provide the links, they might as well be Amazon Associate links. It doesn’t cost the shopper anything extra; we just get a small percentage of the cover price if a purchase is made. It also gives an SEO advantage.

In the wider business context, many of our not-for-profit customers are in the sorts of subject areas that would be ideal for being Amazon Associates and I’m surprised more don’t do this. Accepted that some of them have their own bookshops, so wouldn’t want to dilute their brand. But most don’t operate bookshops, so could.

An Amazon Associate-based shop has a number of advantages:

• You are providing a member / service-user benefit for the cost of writing the content
• There is no order fulfilment to do - Amazon look after this
• There is no financial processing to do - Amazon look after this too, securely
• Some CMSs, including Drupal, provide tools for easily adding links into your web pages

There are of course some disadvantages that might lead organisations to want to have their own shops:

• Customer loyalty will be lower if you are pushing users off to Amazon
• You don’t know who actually buys what, so you lose the information you want in your CRM to do precision marketing
• SEO will be benefitted by a successful online shop
• There is the opportunity to generate conversation around reviews and other user-generated content (likes, star ratings, etc)
• You can offer specialist products such as PDF subscriptions
• You can link the online shop into other products, such as subscriptions, events, exams, etc. giving you opportunities for cross selling and up-selling

The choice is likely to depend on the strategy and ambitions of your organisation.