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
