Amazon takes a cue from Chitika’s eMiniMalls?
Today, Amazon announced that they’re beta testing a new feature called “product previews”. Product previews transform ordinary Amazon referral links, the ones that look like this:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321321146/dealworld-20
Into JavaScript-enhanced product links. Hover over one of these links and you’ll see an inline popup window like this one appear:
The popup disappears when you move off the link.
Not everyone will see this. During the beta test period, Amazon will randomly enable or disable the feature for visitors to a given site. If you don’t see the feature in your own browser, try deleting the cookie called “amazon_vf” from your browser’s cookie cache and refreshing the page. You may have to do this a few times. (Firefox users, here’s how you do it: Choose “Options…” from the “Tools” menu, then click on the “Privacy” icon on the left of the dialog. Expand the “Cookies” item in the right hand pane and click the “View Cookies” button. In the resulting dialog, click the “Cookie Name” header to sort the cookie list by name, select the “amazon_vf” cookie and press “Remove Cookie” to get rid of it.)
I’m not sure I’m going to use this feature or not, it is a bit intrusive, but I’ll give it a go for a few days. Amazon may drop this feature after the beta if it doesn’t pan out well for them.
What I find really interesting about this feature is that it’s very similar to the concept of Chitika 
’s eMiniMalls units, which basically display more detailed information about a product, although the eMiniMalls units are displayed right in the page.
Note pop-ups are allowed by the AdSense program policies as long as they don’t interfere with navigation or obscure Google ads, so my interpretation is that this feature is safe to use on AdSense pages.
Originally from An AdSense Blog: Make Easy Money with Google on November 18, 2005, 2:35pm
Related Posts