Amazon.com sent merchants an email last week informing them of a new CPC advertising program it is testing called Product Ads. The program allows merchants to upload product catalog feeds and bid for ad space on the Amazon.com website, similar to Google and Yahoo's ad programs. Visitors who click on the Product Ads on Amazon.com are taken to the merchants' own website.

Corey Creed of Hippo Internet Marketing, an Internet marketing consulting and training company, wrote about Amazon Product Ads on his blog on Thursday (http://www.thejunglemap.com/post/194). He included a link to the catalog specs and wrote that Shopzilla feeds are acceptable. According to Creed, the minimum bid for each category varies; for example, he wrote, the minimum bid in the Toys category ranges from $0.15 to $0.25 (depending on sub-category), and the minimum bid in the Jewelry and Watches category is 75 cents.

Amazon.com describes the program as a limited test in the following categories: Electronics & Computers, Home & Garden, Tools, and Toys and Kids & Baby.

In a research note issued on Friday, Wall Street analyst Scott Devitt of Stifel, Nicolaus & Company wrote, "Product Ads has just launched and will not be meaningful in the near-term but with Product Ads, Amazon Direct, Amazon Mobile, Amazon Digital, Marketplaces, and Merchants@ combined with solid execution, we may be witnessing the emergence of the strongest competitive advantage on the Internet. It may be, in fact, that Amazon is the real Google."

http://www.amazon.com/Advertising

Related blog posts

http://www.comparisonengines.com/2008/02/06/amazon-becomes-the-largest-shopping-engine

http://seekingalpha.com/article/63723-amazon-launches-product-ads-in-response-to-google-encroachment