Affiliate Window Gets a Blog

When Affiliate Networks start blogging, you get one additional reason to trust them a little bit more than you used to. It’s a cool thing for affiliate networks to have blogs, it means they are being transparent about their business and allow a forum where their customers - affiliates and merchants - can interact publicly with with network. I am sure you’ll all agree that one of the reasons we all love shareasale so much is because of it’s communication with the affiliate marketing community - they’re everywhere, on forums, twitter and their blog.

UK based Affiliate window, which already has a widget platform, an API, RSS feeds etc, is now the latest network to start it’s own blog, check it out here!

The official Affiliate Window blog has been launched! The blog will cover news and views from the Network, up coming events, new technologies, advice, comment and opinion about the affiliate marketing industry as a whole. All articles and features will be specially created by Affiliate Window staff from across the company, giving you a balanced, informative and interesting read. Already we have blogged about analysing programme performance, the recent AWin training event and our Website givaway.

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Amazon launches the “All Business Center”

Amazon sent out a press release a few hours ago announcing a new niche category on the online super-mall - the All Business Center - for small and medium sized businesses.

This latest offering from Amazon is a sort of niche social-network and retail store where small business owners can use the discussion forums to chat about their businesses and rest of the “business center” to buy stuff ranging from amazon webservices to office supplies and amazon fulfillment services to books and software.

While research indicates that small and medium businesses are experiencing a higher success rate in the early years, entrepreneurs still struggle with many day-to-day challenges such as poor inventory management, unexpected growth and low sales. The Amazon All Business Center provides customers with a single, comprehensive resource aimed at helping small and medium business owners address these types of issues and increase the odds of success.

All in all, a nice web 1.4.5 place to shop for business needs, it could be marketed a whole lot better if amazon added more social-networking elements to the mix other than just a plain old discussion forum.

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Yet another social shopping network acquired

Sugar, Inc, formerly known as Sugar Publishing, the online publishing company that publishes popular blogs targeted towards women has acquired a social shopping startup ShopStyle, reports Om Malik.

Today, the company decided to take the next step in its evolution and has bought Los Altos, Calif.-based ShopStyle, a social shopping site for an undisclosed amount of money. “We had content and community, and now we are adding commerce,” said Brian Sugar, CEO of Sugar Publishing. The company is also changing its name to Sugar Inc., in order to better reflect its broader focus.

The acquisition is seen as a move to make use of ShopStyle’s existing infrastructure and business model that is aimed at revenue generation to monetize the sugar network of blogs that currently lot as many as 5 million unique visitors a month.

More on GigaOM ->

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Amazon 2.0s it’s affiliate program even more, launches (monetizable) Widgets

After context-links, Amazon has taken yet another step to let the latest generation of internet publishers make use of amazon’s huge catalog to monetize their web properties/presence.

According to a press release sent out earlier today…

“Bloggers and active online social networkers have asked us for a fun and interesting way to display Amazon products on their pages as a way to showcase their favorite things. With Amazon Widgets, they can now do this and make money at the same time,” said Sean McMullan, Manager, Amazon Associates.

Amazon today launched seven new widgets in the Amazon Widgets Gallery, and there are more specialized widgets coming soon.

Some of the widgets released today (available at widgets.amazon.com) include widgets for wish lists, product searches, product previews, slideshows and amazon unbox videos previews.

This widget below is a tag cloud of some of the popular products on amazon:

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Amazon adds NBC shows to Unbox

In a Press release Amazon posted a few moments ago (and only a few days after Apple decided to stop selling NBC shows on iTunes), they announce the availability of NBC shows for download at Amazon Unbox - the (unfortunately DRMed) Tivo-compatible video download service.

Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) and NBC Universal today announced that a wealth of quality TV content from NBC Universal is now available on Amazon Unbox (http://unbox.amazon.com), Amazon.com’s digital video download service. Amazon Unbox and NBC Universal are offering customers a variety of content packages, including up to 30 percent off when purchasing full seasons of their favorite TV series.

Popular NBC shows now available on Amazon Unbox include the Emmy(R) Award-winning series The Office, the critically acclaimed drama Heroes, and Emmy(R)-nominated comedy 30 Rock. Beginning on September 10, Amazon Unbox customers can download for free — in advance of their network premieres — the pilot episodes of NBC’s new shows Bionic Woman, Chuck, Journeyman and Life. New episodes will be available on Amazon Unbox the day after they air on TV.

NBC Universal Television Content Now Available on Amazon Unbox

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Wikipedia bans overstock’s IPs for spamming.

Looks like overstock’s IP range has been banned at Wikipedia:

[Wikipedia] just blocked 65.116.112.0/21, which is an IP range (a) owned by Overstock.com (b) widely used by them for spamming, COI editing and attempted intimidation of administrators dealing with them.

Wikipedia bans Overstock.com - Gary Weiss has the full story ->

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The Official eBay facebook App goes live

Finally! Arguably the world’s biggest e-retail brand - eBay has launched it’s very own app for the facebook social networking platform (a.k.a - The Social OS).

eBay has finally launched its Facebook application, which enables you to share your eBay items within your Facebook profile. While there are a handful of Facebook apps that have been created to interact with eBay, this is the official application that’s been created by eBay itself.

There’s a good level of integration for your eBay account to work within Facebook, showing items you’ve found on eBay (your watchlist) and check out the items your friends have added to their watchlists as well. Security options let you pick and choose what information you want to share, and how this information is shared.

Mashable has the story…

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Amazon Flexible Payments Service is US only

So, Amazon just launched the Flexible Payments Service as a part of their webservices offering - what looks like, from the pricing and other details on the page to be something very useful except for the fact that they are only offering the service to those with a credit card issued by a US bank.

Translated for me and my company, this means that paypal and the international merchant account with CCavenue are the only two ways a business physically not located in the US but doing business there can accept payments.

I was totally hoping that this would be an international service not just limited to the US when this was first announced. Nevermind though, paypal still rocks! (Yes, I read all the negative comments about paypal, but it’s just a question of using the service wisely and not falling for phishing, etc. attempts, while also offering consumers a second option other than paypal to pay for their purchases. Paypal IS secure and protects from fraud as long as the sellers and buyers take the standard common-sense fraud-prevention measures themselves first, and leave the rest on the payment service)

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Why isn’t everyone selling on the net accepting paypal yet?

Jim Kukral says:

I don’t get why every online store doesn’t have a PayPal option? I mean, if you’re going to accept credit cards, and even checks, why not have a PayPal option?

I couldn’t agree more. from an e-retailer’s point of view, especially if you are selling cheaper goods, you are making a huge mistake if you are not accepting payments via paypal.

There is a reason paypal has as many as a hundred million users worldwide - it’s probably one of the first media of online transactions for internet users (they are after all, the primary method for paying on ebay!).

Paypal is also VERY easy to use. Sometimes I’m just too lazy to take out the credit card and type in the credit card number, expiry date and CVV2 number, along with my name, address and telephone number to pay for something on the internet. It’s just easier to type in the paypal username and password, press next and finish the transaction.

Jim writes that he uses Paypal as “Fun money” to make impulse purchases, and buy stuff he’d rather not use his credit card for.

If your e-retail website isn’t a huge brand yet, it makes a lot of sense to accept payments via paypal. A buyer doesn’t have to think 10 times before buying from you. if a store doesn’t deliver, it’s super easy for buyers to lodge a complaint with paypal, and paypal will make sure that fraud isn’t happening on it’s platform - a lot of buyers know that.

If you aren’t accepting paypal on your web-shop, I have a two words of advice for you - ACCEPT PAYPAL!

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oh, and talking about paypal, I recently filled out a survey for CJ, one of the questions there was if publishers would like CJ to make payments via paypal. - if they do that, that’d be super-awesome.

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Nuvy.com: Social Shopping + Video Reviews + Affiliate Marketing:

There is a very interesting new social shopping / video reviews website that Jamie Birch just posted about on the revenews blog.

Nuvy - is a youtube clone plus a comparison shopping engine, that - pays - users to upload videos, that are product reviews.

The idea is this: Anyone, can review any product on video, and upload it on the website, the community votes on how good the video is, and based on that, the reviewer is paid a anything between $1-$10.

Video pages are very similar to youtube - but also a little more - there are three tabs below each video - “Product Description” , “Comments” and ” Where to buy” (so that covers the social part in a simple but elegant way)

There are two reasons why I like this:

First, Nuvy is making really fantastic use of the social media/web 2.0 as an affiliate marketing platform.

Secondly, they are actually paying “consumers who are also content creators” - you don’t see that a lot on web 2.0, but that’s what web 2.1 is for - if users create content that helps make a social media platform money, then the users should be treated partners in the business, the best way, IMO is to reward users according to their contribution - in cash.

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Update: I was reading costpernews a while ago, and read Sam’s 600th post there where he is upset at the pace at which affiliate marketers are adopting the new media. So … To cheer Sam up, who is a fellow believer in the salvation of Affiliate Marketing through Web 2.0, I send this Trackback.

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