UK Shopper: Amazon Web Services Case Study

Launched in the spring of 2005, the objective of the UK Shopper websites was to offer UK and US visitors a large range of fast moving consumer goods such as books, CDs, DVDs, computer games and digital products, among others, at highly competitive prices without the need for a purchasing or fulfilment infrastructure. This was to be established by selecting the appropriate affiliate partner(s) who could supply a real-time data feed and reliable affiliate reporting and payment structure.

Secondly, given the competition among the online community, search engine optimisation strategy was of paramount importance when considering the design and development principles. And from a pure design perspective, a fresh and easy-to-navigate template based approach needed to be adopted to allow customers to easily find similar products or related items within certain subcategories. Customers should be able to recommend products to friends in an attempt to increase unique visitors using viral marketing methods.

Finally, a content management system was required to allow product reviews to be published on a weekly basis in order to further drive traffic through SERPs (search engine results pages).

FIFO selected Amazon as the obvious affiliate partner who could provide real-time data feeds and remote shopping basket technology via the Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Services). The websites were all built around a colour coded templates being fed UK and US XML data respectively from Amazon's AWS. "Add to basket" functionality was handled by AWS's remote trolley functionality whereupon visitors can checkout via Amazon's standard interface. Use of cookies enables visitors to shop across websites whilst maintaining the same shopping trolley contents prior to checkout.

Templates were carefully designed and developed with search engine optimisation (SEO) as the core focus. SEO considerations included: use of H1 tags for key information, important keywords prominent near the top of source code, good internal linking structure as well as dynamically generated site maps, dynamically generated meta and title tags, paths to related items published and randomly generated review summaries on product details pages. All websites are continually monitored via AWSTATS which illustrates significant search engine indexing highlighting the effectiveness of the above SEO strategies.

Email-a-friend functionality on product detail pages fulfils the viral marketing requirements. And content management was deployed via Moveable Type enabling reviews to written via an easy-to-use interface.

If you would like to learn more about this case study or FIFO's services in general, please call Jonathan Saipe on 0845 680 1236 or email us.