While prowling the exhibit hall with Anik Singal from AffiliateClassroom, I discovered 2 exciting new services.
PopShops is a GoldenCan competitor which claims to be “the first and only searchable collection of affiliate products (over 10 million and growing) that spans all of the major networks”.
With their Shopbuilder tool, you can create customized storefronts and widgets to earn commissions. Affiliates ID’s are embedded into the links and prices and product info is kept fresh through dynamic links.
Both the output and the affiliate interface are easy on the eyes and the latter appears relatively easy to manipulate.
They offer a free and paid subscription service. The only drawback that I noticed here is that they haven’t yet structured a comparison shopping database OR built a webmaster referal plan.
The second service is RevenueWire, a Clickbank competitor. Geordie Carswell’s developers took everything they couldn’t stand about Clickbank and tried to make it better.
The service is launching on an invite only basis in July and will accept conversion-optimized, downloadable products with commissions starting at 75% and going up from there.
As a merchant, I think merchants with solid, higher-priced products will stear clear unless they change the 75% minimum policy. (I know I will.) On the other hand, for selling lead generation products in the lower price ranges, RevenueWire may eventually end up becoming the best platform.
The interface is beautiful. Check out a demo here (the demo at the Summit was working better but hopefully they’ll get that fixed soon).
A major advantage to merchants and affiliates is the ability to set up different products and different user ID’s – respectively – so that multiple RevenueWire accounts will not be needed for tracking purposes.
Once again however, they don’t have a webmaster referal program in place.
Best of luck to the developer’s of both these services… and let me know when you get your referal programs in place!
[tags]PopShops, RevenueWire, Geordie Carswell [/tags]
About Rosalind Gardner
Thanks for the mention Rosalind!
We’re working on the system improving things minute by minute as we move toward our launch, so things are constantly being updated and tweaked in the demo accounts. The merchant demo is also available on http://www.revenuewire.com/merchant as well as a preview of our SafeCart shopping cart for credit card processing.
At your suggestion, a referral program is coming soon:)
the 75 percent minimum commission of RevenueWire is laughable. vendors of solid high-ticket non-informational products (like my own) offer commission percentages much less than this. the affiliate still makes a more than decent return, but 75 percent is giving it away. if you spend several years developing a product you won’t stay in business with this model. the only vendors RevenueWire will attract are junk peddlers whose retained 25 percent is far more than the product is worth.
Rosalind,
Thanks for the info on Popshops! I checked them out as soon as I read your post and have since set up my first site using their service at InnerStarYoga.com. Jessie at Popshops was ever so helpful and their interface couldn’t be easier to use. I’m plotting my next site as we speak! Thanks again!