As you may noticed in tweets and emails newsletters, the short URL of any product page on Amazon.com has a standard format that looks something like amzn.to/XYZ.

The path portion of Amazon short URLs is made of random digits and alphabets but if you wish, you can also use a more memorable string as a short URL. Here’s how:

Go to bit.ly and sign-in using your Facebook or Twitter account. Next paste any Amazon URL into the text box and hit the Shorten button.

Bitly will generate an amzn.to URL with a random suffix but you use the “Customize” option (see video) to set any other string as the suffix for that short URL. For instance, I reserved the following two URLs for my eBook that I published last week.

1. amzn.to/MyKindleBook

2. amzn.to/MostUsefulWebsites

These URL suffixes (or keywords) are shared across the bitly ecosystem so if someone has reserved a particular keyword with another website that also uses bitly (like nyti.ms or 4sq.com), it won’t be available for your Amazon Short URL.

One more thing. All products listed on Amazon are assigned a unique ASIN code (it is listed in the item’s description) and you can just add this code to amzn.com to quickly create a short URL. Here’s an example - amzn.com/B006R4RN3U.

The same technique may be extended to other websites that are configured to work with bit.ly - these Facebook (on.fb.me), BBC (bbc.in), The Wall Street Journal (on.wsj.com), The New York Post (nypo.st) and others.

Video: Customize Amazon Short URLs