Jon Griffin's Site | Amazon Collections

We’re going to talk about a little feature that Amazon has included in August of 2013. In August 2013, Amazon quietly released a new feature that will be of interest to marketers called Amazon Collections. It’s a direct competitor to Pinterest. There’s some significant differences though. Why Amazon even matters. First, a quick recap for those who don’t like or use Amazon. I know you’re out there. One reason Amazon’s very important, especially to the men reading this, is that Amazon has a very diverse audience. It’s not a heavily female-dominated site like Pinterest and some people have already declared Collections the male Pinterest. So that should peak your interest a bit.

Amazon Collections vs Pinterest

So let’s talk about Amazon Collections versus Pinterest. Pinterest allows you to pin almost any content to their account including links to products. In fact, Pinterest has upped the commerce ante by announcing the addition of several commerce-friendly enhancements like product pins, personal recommendations, analytics, and also they launched in August 2013 price alerts. It must be noted though that Amazon will most likely add features to Collection including some of the above. As a marketer I hope you see the possibilities.

How to use Amazon Collections

So let’s get going on how to use Collections. Of quick note, not all products seem to be available to be added to Collections at this time but that is possibly because of some lag time during their role out and I’ll show you an example of that. But first, let’s go look at the Collections. The easy way to do this is to obviously have an Amazon account. I’m not going to go into that since almost everyone already has one that’s reading this. But you’re going to notice there’s a new button underneath product images that says add to Collection.

So let’s just go real quick here to one of my products. I might as well promote my own thing. And this will give us an example of some that aren’t there. So let’s go here to the Cuba master series. If we click on that, you’ll notice it says add to Collection. That’s the pin that you’re looking for. So the easiest thing to do is just simply click that button. You’ll be brought to your Collections page and the default Collections are my style, want list, and possibilities. But, as you can see, from this video, you’re free to collect your own Collections. In this case, I created a Collection called great books. So we can put this in here. Whatever you want. This is a great book for the aspiring Cuban music musician. It doesn’t really matter what you put.

As you can see, there’s my style possibilities and want list. But I’m going to leave it in great books. You can also just hit create a new collection. So, let’s just click add to collection and you’ll see now it’s successfully added and you can view great books, which would be mine, and you can also see what other people are collecting. But we will go to great books and this is going to give you an example of what your account looks like. So you can see, I’ve put a few of mine in there. I have four collections and zero likes because I haven’t promoted this and its brand new. So what you can do is go back to show you what one that probably doesn’t have or at least didn’t have the last time I checked. Let’s go to the Cuba master series DVD. So as you can see with this product there is no button yet and I’m assuming that’s because they haven’t rolled it out, like I said before, but it also could be that the best seller’s working its way down and I don’t sell a ton of these anymore. So it may be just that the rank isn’t as high as it should be.

So there are other ways you can do that. If you go to your account, you can go to your collections right here and you can see this menu called learn more. And it will tell you a bunch of information but you’ll see an option for add to collection. You can click on the product there but there’s also drag this button to your browser’s bookmark bar and click it on any Amazon.com product page. So you can simply just drag this up to here and you can see it’ll go in collect and now I can go back to my DVD and I can just say collect. And since this isn’t a great book, I’ll put this in create a new collection and we’ll type in great DVDs. I didn’t put a comment but that doesn’t really matter. But now we can go to great DVDs and you can add a caption, you can edit it. So you can always add stuff later to it. You can like it, which I would suggest doing. And you can also collect this item, which I already have, so it doesn’t really do any good. But adding a caption might be useful. There’s all kinds of things you can do.

Caveats

So with that said, I have some caveats. I can imagine many of you are lining up your fiver gigs right now to create these boards with fake accounts. I would highly recommend not doing that. Even if it is allowed today, and by allowed I mean nobody’s canceling accounts, Amazon isn’t going to be stupid enough to allow it in the future. I will guarantee that they have ways of knowing. You know, if you’ve got 5000 likes on a product that sold 30 in its entire life, something’s probably not right. So like most things that are black hat or even gray hat, you’ll probably get burned in the end and I would just have your list, have your people, do some normal marketing promotion, have people like it, put it on their want list and other things.

So that’s my suggestion. My suggestion is direct your list and buyers to the button, then just have them leave a legitimate collection. If you’re an author, put a big old page in the back asking for comments and for the reader to add the book to their collection. Don’t spam. It’s not nice. I hope that helped and hopefully you learned about a new feature on Amazon.