It’s been a couple of months since I last added a post to our blog. The truth is I have been very busy, spending hundreds of hours improving our Amazon Affiliate Rock Solid Store. The store was originally conceived as a means for Rock Solid Teen Center affiliates to purchase items for their teen center, with the commission going toward the cost of consultation and building a teen center. What we discovered the hard way is Amazon will not credit commissions of purchases by friends and associates. And if we begin to work together on a center, Amazon will define you as an associate and we will not receive a commission. The reality is that Amazon, Google, and the like are almost Godlike in what they know about you and me. And that should give reason to pause.

Our Amazon Affiliate store involves the use of several “plugins.” What we discovered is that they do not work very well. The plugin that we use is excellent at identifying the best-selling and highest-rated products. It does a terrible job of keeping prices up to date and creating high-quality product pages.

Realizing that prices change often, almost daily with some product lines, instead of posting the price, we have created a button that opens another tab that takes you directly to the Amazon product page. There your information and price are up to date. By clicking the image of a product on a shop page, it will take you to the single product post, with the most up-to-date information and usually multiple photos of the item.

On our shop pages, we’ve added a few lines of the product description, so you can learn more detail about a product than just the name, without having to click the product link.

I have gone painstakingly over each single product page. The plugin that creates the rough draft of a product page often leaves out important information, and the spelling and grammar are frequently atrocious. We edit each product page so that information is not missing, and that the errors have been removed. Interestingly enough, the wording with poor spelling and bad grammar is directly from the Amazon product pages.

It is because we can be certain that the product prices are up to date that we are able to focus on expanding the product line. Over the course of the next year, it should grow substantially. As has been our practice, we will only add Amazon Choice and highly rated products.

Rock Solid Teen Center is committed to helping community leaders, churches, and other groups build affordable and functional youth centers for small to medium size towns and communities. Directing you to the products that you will need at our Rock Solid Store provides an additional means of simplifying the process of finding high-quality products at a price you can afford.

One last note: Rock Solid Teen Center is a Christian-based nonprofit. We would love to help you build a faith-based Rock Solid Teen Center affiliate. However, if your project is secular in nature, we are still available to assist with non-affiliate projects.

Sincerely,

Mark Eastway