Good Storm is working on a service for bloggers called MeCommerce which effectively puts a little book, DVD and CD store right on your sidebar.
At a first look it doesn’t seem much different to running Amazon ads in your side bar until you click one of the products highlighted when the process of ordering the products happens right there on your blog. Let me show you how it works.
The first picture below is what you see when you go to a blog before clicking a link:
The next screen cap is of what happens without leaving your blog when you click a link:
Click the ‘Billing Information’ arrow and you’re the following comes up:
Click the ‘shipping information’ arrow and a similar thing happens.
The beauty of this system is that your readers never leave your blog to make the purchase of the book, CD or DVD’s that you’re highlighting.
You keep 50% of the product mark up. This isn’t heaps on these types of products but if you choose your products well and have relevant content and high readership it could work well for some bloggers. I’d also be interested to see with how 50% of the mark up on a book or CD compares to earning the 4-8% of the total price of a book or CD that Amazon offers. I suspect it will be similar – it sounds a lot but I guess it depends what the mark up is!
Choosing products happens by creating ‘tags’ that trigger books (ie a tag might be ‘knitting’) or by selecting specific products. The MeCommerce units can be customized in terms of colors and sizes to match your blog.
The only real downside that I can see is that their design is pretty average – I’m not sure I’d want something looking like that on my sidebar. Perhaps the options they give to customize it will help but my first impression is not great of it’s design. Apart from that I quite like the concept.
You can put your name down for the beta on their MeCommerce page which also has further details and a working example of a MeCommerce unit in action.
If you’re looking for a similar product to compare this to you might also like to check out RightCart which effectively does the same thing.
found via TechCrunch
Other downside is it’s only for the U.S.A. right?
Surprised Amazon hasn’t thought of this one so far, they say patent pending on the site and I wonder if Bezos covered his rear by already thinking of this Gem.
Sounds like a great idea though, major impulse marketing and in this fast paced blogosphere, impulse is everything.
Interested to know about profits though, I would assume the owner of this service isn’t going to be sourcing all of the products so I would guess a database is setup with amazon.
If it increases purchases though sharing profits with yet another middle man might not be so bad.
I work on the MeCommerce system at GoodStorm. I’m happy to answer a few of the questions raised here.
We are not doing an affiliate system through a service like Amazon. We are going to the source…this lets us open up the profit margin for bloggers as much as possible. Over time we should be able to increase the margins even more…our goal is to give as much to the bloggers as possible (that’s the “Capitalism Done Right” goal of GoodStorm). It’s why the custom apparel service that GoodStorm offers now is able to give away 70% of the proceeds above the cost of the printed shirts.
The markup on a book like the “All Music Guide” (this is one of the samples we rotate through on the front page of MeCommerce’s site) would bring the blogger over $7. We can’t compete with Amazon on low value pricing….for the visitor to your blog it’s the difference between “value” shopping and “values” shopping. It’s about encouraging your readers to support you.
On the design, we’ll work on more options. Let us know what you’d like to see.
Will regular customers feel safe enough to enter their credit card number on a page that doesn’t show the SSL lock icon on the bottom right of their browsers?
It is secure though? I guess that it is probably an iframe going to a secure location?
Yes, it is a secure iframe with the Verisign Secured Seal displayed during the ordering.
“patent pending” — what a joke!!!
They can’t be serious to apply for a patent for something that simple and I KNOW that it is definitively not “prior art”. There are a few ecommerce solutions available in both Europe and the US which support so called “affiliate shops” / “white label shops” for their affiliates. People can also buy there without leaving the website of the affiliate.
Maybe the patent authority in the US is stupid enough to give a patent to something like this but at least in Europe we do not have software patents and even with them simple solutions would not be allowed.
Greets, Taylor
I too do not like the way patents have been issued in this country. Amazon’s one-click is a famous and very controversial patent.
You cannot analyze based patent filing on the basis of what you see because there are many attributes to any patent. Let me just say that what may seem to be the heart of any patent may not be it at all ~ especially for software patents that have dozens, if not hundreds of underlying claims.
Software and networks are so complex and not even been remotely explored by human ingenuity.
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