It appears that Amazon is kicking its new shopping referral program, Amazon Product Ads, into high gear. Brian at Comparison Shopping Engines reports that Amazon has reached out to target online retailers with an overview of the program and its benefits.

Only available today in the Consumer Electronics, Home & Garden, Tools Toys and Kids & Babies categories, it gives retailers the option to bid for an ad on a product detail page. Here’s a great example of a Product Ad-only listing with no Amazon offer (direct source or 3P seller) which will drive incremental traffic to Amazon and in turn more buyers for the products you sell on Amazon.com.

Of course there are still kinks to be worked out. If you look at the Furniture category you will notice that some of the product inventory for Product Ads creates duplicate listings in Amazon’s catalog. That in turn has the potential to confuse shoppers and reduce overall sales.

While there are concerns that these ads may push buyers away from Amazon (to purchase products on third-party sites) and clutter up what’s designed to offer the easiest and fastest online shopping experience, this can be a big opportunity for Amazon merchants selling in very competitive categories with little luck of getting the Amazon Buy Box (think Consumer Electronics …). I would start to carefully bid for the associated Product Ads for these competitive SKUs to see if and how it will boost your bottom line.

You can sign-up by following this link.

Related posts:

1. A primer to Amazon.com’s product categories Amazon is the global marketplace-of-choice for convenience buyers with 30+% annual growth and as such a very attractive channel for most online retailers looking to...
2. Amazon Vine: Paid product reviews? I think it's fair to say that consumer product reviews directly and significantly drive conversions with mere mortals (and not the retailer) sharing their 2...
3. Amazon Checkout Launched! It appears that Amazon has officially launched its rumored Amazon Checkout product, the PayPal Express Checkout / Google Checkout competitor. While there has been no...