Does your pastor ever recommend books to your congregation? Do you have small groups that read books together? Are there recommended videos or Bible study aids that you want to be able to offer to your congregation? Are there books about your denomination that you would make available at your website?
Have you considered opening an online store? Or, have you been deterred by the costs of accepting online orders, keeping inventory in stock, and fulfilling orders? What if you just picked the products you wanted to make available, and let someone else handle everything else?
This is where Amazon's aStore comes in! You can create an "
Amazon Associates" account for free, and have an online storefront up and running within hours. You can handpick the products you want to advertise, sort them into categories, and embed the entire storefront right into your website, so your visitors can shop right through your store. The shopping cart, order processing, credit card payments, fulfillment, and shipping are all handled by Amazon.
To top it all off, not only will Amazon take care of all of that, they'll pay your church a 4% (or more) commission on all the products you sell.
To see this in action, take a look at the
storefront I just created for
LectionaryChat.com. You can see how I customized the colors of the storefront to match the colors of the site, and how it is embedded (through the use of an iframe) right into the site so that visitors don't have to leave the site at all until they're ready to check out.
Labels: amazon, Spotlight, website monetization
