booBox To Help Bloggers Sell Stuff

TechCrunch report that booBox (a Brazillian start up) are getting ready to launch a service that will help bloggers and other webmasters monetize their sites.

It’s an interesting concept which is best understood by using their demo of it here.

In short – bloggers add tags to images on their blogs which adds a little icon to images (you can see the little red icon in the top left hand corner of the image to the left).

If a reader clicks the icon they are taken to a ‘lightbox’ which opens up above the page with some pictures of the item (and others related to it).

The lightbox is where any transaction will take place (ie they don’t really leave your site as the blog will remain open behind it) and it can be closed down at any time during the reader interaction with it.

Readers are asked ‘Do you want to buy any of these items?’ (see screenshot below – click to get an enlarged version).

If a reader clicks the image they are taken (in the light box) to Amazon (or another participating store) where they can buy the product.

If they buy something the publisher earns a commission via the affiliate program.

As TC points out – there isn’t heaps of information yet for bloggers thinking of signing up when it’s released (they are doing a closed beta at the moment).

There’s no mention of how the tags are added to images yet (it would want to be easy and seamless) and there is no mention of how booBox makes money from it (ie most programs like this will take a certain % of impressions for themselves).

They do mention on their site that to make money you need to have signed up for the affiliate program of the stores they use – but that they’ll use different stores for different countries. Sounds like it could get a little messy if you want to have stores for all of the different countries that your readership comes from. I’d like to see more clarification of that.

In terms of an actual concept – I’m not a huge fan of anything that interrupts the flow of readers on a site. This ‘lightbox’ is nicely designed but it is slightly ‘popup-ish’.

My only other concern is that the icon itself doesn’t really say or mean anything to the average user and I wonder if readers will click it and if they do whether they’ll know what it is. The key to get people buying things at Amazon’s Associates program (and other online stores) is to presell the product and to have them know what they’re clicking through to (ie an opportunity to buy). I personally find my conversions with Amazon are a lot better with text links embedded in content that say something like ‘get a price on XXXXX item’ or ‘buy the XXXXX item at Amazon’.

Found via B.L. Ochman

Update: in comments at TechCrunch one of the booBox developers shares that integration for those using booBox is as simple as adding ‘one line of HTML code’.