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Is this a Stupid Idea?

by AffiliatingAlan
8 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I had an idea that I may eventually pan out. I have never made an amazon type e-commerce store and wanted to try it out. It seems extremely easy to make as there is no article/content writing needed.

I am wondering however, if it is a stupid idea to make one of these stores with a branded domain and without doing any keyword research?

What I mean by that is that besides maybe your primary keyword all other pages titles/keyword would be the model/product name of the products you are displaying.

So no keyword research brainstorming would really be done.

The hope would be get traffic from long tail keywords and maybe go a more social media route and try and get people that are interested in your niche to know your brand name.

Is this a stupid idea or is this how all e-commerce sites function? I've never looked into this so I have no idea what makes these sites fail or work as I've always done keyword research as a guide for failure or success.

halp
#idea #stupid
  • Profile picture of the author robert5000
    No , it is not a stupid idea but you have several competitors.
    Moreover, Amazon doesn't like this kind of websites and can ban your account every time and Google in a recent update has penalized this websites.
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    • Profile picture of the author dmcmark
      Originally Posted by robert5000 View Post

      No , it is not a stupid idea but you have several competitors.
      Moreover, Amazon doesn't like this kind of websites and can ban your account every time and Google in a recent update has penalized this websites.
      I fully agree with you robert.
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      • Profile picture of the author nik0
        Banned
        You can still get away with it when you use the right platform and a solid expired domain with pagerank.

        At least that's what I lately experienced when I gave WooCommerce a try with the Amazon woocommerce plugin.
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  • Profile picture of the author SEO-Dave
    Loads of people do this, I used to (many moons ago) make tens of thousands of dollars a year from what Google calls thin affiliate sites.

    Google has never liked them, but around 2005 they got really good at penalizing them, so it's a lot harder to make money from them today.

    There's loads of scripts that can make Amazon stores. WPRobot (premium WordPress plugin) is quite good since you can mix the amazon content with other content sources.

    David
    Signature
    Freelance SEO Consultant
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    First of all an ecommerce store is not a thin site. If I'm looking to buy a new PC monitor (example) I don't need a fake review article that's 750 words long, I need the product specs. + an image, nothing else.

    For some reason folks around here think articles are how pages are ranked which is wrong.
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    • Profile picture of the author SEO-Dave
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      First of all an ecommerce store is not a thin site. If I'm looking to buy a new PC monitor (example) I don't need a fake review article that's 750 words long, I need the product specs. + an image, nothing else.

      For some reason folks around here think articles are how pages are ranked which is wrong.
      Erm, try reading the OPs question and you'll see this bit

      It seems extremely easy to make as there is no article/content writing needed.

      Not sure how you create an Amazon type store that's not thin content without any content writing or to be more precise EASY (as the OP wants)?

      Admittedly I'm assuming a poster with the name AffiliateAlan is planning to make an Amazon affiliate store rather than a real ecommerce store where he sells the products (not as an affiliate) and plans to make a site similar in design to Amazon's.

      Before I got into SEO my first site was a real ecommerce store (sold sex toys and lingerie, great markup, not so much fun dealing with returns!) and everything I sold was available from plenty of other sites, but I wrote my own product descriptions so they were unique and they ranked high in search engines (this was over 10 years ago). Not that much has changed regarding unique content, if you don't add value to the standard product content it's going to struggle to compete with all the other sites that are using the basic product specs and the manufacturers description and nothing else.

      And no I'm not suggesting a 750 word article (why 750 words???), added value doesn't necessarily mean an article. Could be comparison with other sellers, comparisons with similar products, unique images, user ratings/reviews.

      David
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      Freelance SEO Consultant
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  • Profile picture of the author sunlounger10004
    Not a stupid idea but be careful!
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  • Profile picture of the author legitsellerusa
    It is not a stupid idea. Look for example at this seller xeniasites.com. She uses longtail keywords strategy and a lot of products uploaded to her stores. I am not sute how good these sites are but according to some testimonials I heard from my friends and the number of sites she has already sold on Flippa it looks that this syrategy still works. As for Google, it does not like any affiliate sites of course, but Amazon accepts them and obviously they can bring some profit.
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