Since French startup Zlio opened in the US in February, it has been busy making alliances with US companies (and annoying Amazon.com too). Zlio is a service that enables any Internet user to start a virtual store and populate it with products from a number of merchants. Zlio automatically figures out which of their merchant partners have the best price. They then share affiliate revenue with their users. Zlio calls this “social E-Commerce”.
Today Zlio announced an agreement for their US site to partner with Shopping.com, an online shopping comparison service that is owned by eBay. This will allow Zlio “shopkeepers” to generate revenue every time someone clicks on a product in their shop. In other words, Zlio users can now be paid per click as well as per sale on their ZlioShops.
An example of what Shopping.com does: you could filter a clothing search with a specific material, brand, style or price. Shopping.com has more than 6000 merchants and they are hoping they get qualified leads from the ZlioShops Network.
This ‘per click’ revenue share system already exists on the French version of Zlio, via a partnership with Kelkoo/Yahoo.
Zlio was in the news in May, when US e-commerce giant Amazon clamped down on Zlio and told them they could no longer promote Amazon products in the United States. Amazon’s own aStore product functions very similar to Zlio, except that it only promotes Amazon’s products. But Zlio soon hit back, by partnering with US chain book store Barnes & Noble – giving Zlio 1.5 M more product items for their catalog and essentially replacing all the Amazon stock they were forced to remove.
This is very smart partnering by Zlio and certainly an effective way to hit back at Amazon.com, by joining forces with one of Amazon’s biggest rivals (B&N) and another big Internet co (eBay).
Also see Read/WriteWeb’s full review of Zlio.
