Reign of the Widget.... feeds feeds feeds

Reign of the Widget

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing - June 08, 2007

I played around with PopShops.com, a relatively new service for affiliate marketers and anybody else who wants to monetize their website or blog. PopShops.com was founded by Jessie Jones.

Overview
PopShops is a tool that offers easy to generate mini shops and widgets for your site, feed or blog. PopShop lists over 800 merchants with over eight million products across the three leading affiliate networks CJ, LinkShare and ShareASale (more will follow). It also supports some in-house programs.

Note on the side: Kudos to Dan Harms and his development team. I know how hard it is to kick around a couple million products from several hundred data feeds. It is blazing fast.

The interface is easy to use and true Web 2.0 style, using the prototype framework.

The available output options range from JavaScript snippets, classic ASP and PHP code, XML, RSS, TypePad or Blogger widget and more. The basic version is free and does not use "click sharing" or “fourth Click”, like GoldenCan or DataFeedFile, who offer similar services. This means that your affiliate links are used for every click by users on your site on any of the advertised products in the widget.

Paid versions (monthly fee) offer additional features including white label results. Currently every account has access to the full feature set, because the service is still in beta. That will change once they are out of beta and beta-customers can decide then, if they want to upgrade to the paid version or not.

Since PopShops does not interfere with the business between the affiliate and the merchant, thus do not have the need for an affiliate relationship with every merchant they support. Merchant tools are currently under development. If you are a merchant and would like to have your feed included, contact PopShops directly, at Affiliate Summit for example or other upcoming industry events.

See also ... Synthasite
Another good example of leveraging the new technologies and possibilities for affiliate marketers is the recent alpha launch of Synthasite, a project by Vinny Lingham’s Incubeta. The difference between the two is that PopShops.com lets you enrich your existing site with product showcase widgets, while Synthasite also allows people to create complete sites to promote selected products.

Conclusion
This is a good development for the industry in my opinion. The only thing sad about it is the fact that smart affiliate marketers and entrepreneurs are now doing the job that was supposed to be the job of affiliate networks. How much more wake-up calls are needed to them realize that the train is in motion, without them.

CJ's introduction of Webservices last September at CJU was a step into the right direction, but since the announcement did not much happen there. CJ listen, you got tons of feedback and suggestions already at CJU. None of it did seem to have made it into the services yet. Why did you stop?