Amazon Offers ‘Amazon Pages’ For Brands To Customize With Their Own URLs, And ‘Amazon Posts’ For Social Media Marketing
Just in time for the holiday shopping blitz, it looks like Amazon is opening a new chapter in its role as an online marketplace for third-parties to sell their goods. The company is quietly pushing a service called Amazon Pages, which lets companies set up their own pages on Amazon.com as “custom destinations,” complete with www.amazon.com/brandname URLs and dynamic designs with large photos and social media links. Along with this, it is also offering Amazon Posts for companies to market themselves across Amazon and Facebook, and Amazon Analytics to measure how well all of the above is working. The analytics are limited currently to how well brands’ Amazon-led efforts are performing, but there isn’t really anything stopping the company from offering the same kind of measurements to brands for their positioning across the wider internet — putting Amazon in closer quarters against the likes of Salesforce and Oracle in the process. The bigger effort around pages, meanwhile, gives Amazon a significant leg up in its positioning brands and smaller businesses that might potentially look to Amazon as a way of running their full online operation, in place of their own standalone websites. The fact that there are URLs involved here also gives another intriguing twist to the news from many months ago about Amazon filing for dozens of generic new TLD names like “.buy”, “.group”, “.room” and “.shop”. The initiative comes from the company’s Amazon Marketing Services division, which has also posted a PDF taking people through the process of working with the three features. That PDF guide was only created and posted yesterday. We have reached out to Amazon to ask about these services. In the meantime, here is what we see on the site: The Pages feature lets brands, businesses and individuals register their own pages on Amazon, and it provides them with templates to create their storefronts. These let brands register amazon pages customized with their own names (for example http://www.amazon.com/techcrunch). Amazon Pages looks more dynamic than what you get at the moment: companies can include more photography, including ‘hero’ large images (two examples illustrated here), buttons to Facebook and Twitter pages, and “merchandizing widgets” that let you select and place links to specific products of yours or others offered through Amazon. Amazon Posts, meanwhile, is a foray into social marketing. Creators of Amazon Pages can use it to update their sites with new messages, and Amazon
Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, and a stalemate between Amazon and big retailers, including Barnes & Noble, over the sale of books from the online giant’s publishing imprint is giving a fillip to BitTorrent — once a hotbed of piracy, and now a straight-laced and legal content distribution network — as a platform for marketing books. Tim Ferriss, one of the author’s signed to the Amazon imprint, has 
Most of the discussion about “the Internet’s Fantastic Four” at the Techonomy conference this afternoon focused on the ways Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have come to dominate the online landscape. But the panelists were also asked to identify which of the companies seemed particularly vulnerable.
I’ve greatly enjoyed watching the petty controversies that erupted this week, controversies having to do with what can only loosely be described as buyer’s remorse: indignant iPad owners, a mysteriously banished Amazon customer, and a host of people calling foul on Facebook’s promoted posts. One of these is a legitimate and productive complaint, the others are nothing but a froth about the mouth.
When it comes to being the Mall of the Internet, no one really does it better than Amazon. Yet, to truly best its offline competitors and put the icing on the cake in terms of user experience, Amazon has been pushing hard to offer same-day delivery for all items purchased within its virtual walls. However, 