Amazon earlier this week launched amazon.in, an online marketplace for books and DVDs in India. The new shopping site, according to a press release from Amazon, includes a selection of over 200 million books (physical books and not Kindle ebooks) while mobile phones and digital cameras will be added to the catalogue in the coming weeks.

The shopping experience at Amazon.in is quite similar to other Amazon sites though their Indian store is the only one that offers Cash on Delivery as a payment option. You do however need to pay an extra fee (39) for COD.

Other than the marketplace, Amazon has quietly launched Associates, their popular affiliate program for bloggers and website owners in India. Amazon will pay 10% commission when visitors follow affiliated links from your website to Amazon.in and make a purchase.

To get started, go to affiliate-program.amazon.in and sign-in with your existing Amazon account. Fill in the form and they’ll manually approve your site with 24 hours. Once you are approved, you can use your Amazon Affiliate IDs to link to products listed on amazon.in and earn referral fees for sales that happen via your affiliated link.

How to Build Affiliate Links for Amazon.in

You can easily build affiliated HTML links from your Amazon Associates dashboard but there’s a simple way that will create clean affiliate hyperlinks.

All products listed on the Amazon website have a unique ASIN code and for printed books, this ASIN code is the same as the 10-digit ISBN code of that book. For instance, the ISBN and ASIN code for Sheryl Sandberg’s latest book is 0753541637. This code can be found on the Product Details section of any Amazon listing.

Once you that have the ASIN/ISBN and your Amazon Associate ID, just build an HTML hyperlink in the following format.

http://www.amazon.in/dp/ASINCode/?tag=AffiliateID (see sample link)

Competing online book stores like Flipkart and Infibeam offer 6% and 5% commission on books respectively while eBay’s affiliate program is not available in India. Since Amazon India pays a higher commission (10%), blogs and websites owners in India are more likely to link to the Amazon.in website and that is likely to push them up in the organic search results.

Also see: How to embed Amazon book previews in your website