The idea of owning commission-based affiliate shops has been existent for years – one has been easily able to become an Amazon affiliate, start a website which provides focused listings on a topic and make money from the commissions – but French startup Zlio, which just finished raising $3.5 million in venture capital, aims to make it easier for you.
How It Works
I was fairly surprised at how fast and easy Zlio is to setup. Basically, you select a topic you’re going to merchandise, choose a shop title, a theme, and add products to your shop by searching for terms in their database (you can add more later). Once you’re signed up, that’s about it, you can then go ahead and promote your shop and get a commission if or when someone makes a purchase. The commission rate isn’t specified, although since Zlio gets its listings from Yahoo! Shopping and others I can assume it’ll be around Amazon’s 4% to its affiliate marketers.
Opinion
Zlio, both in terms of idea and execution has done very well, and I’m surprised at how easy they’ve made what would take individuals days to get setup and running by themselves. I do wish they provided a little more power to the advanced users like letting them create their own themes, but I suppose they’re really not going for that market.
