Social Shopping & First Facebook Affiliate Platform on Horizon

Yesterday brought an interesting news — Zibaba, a Facebook ecommerce storefront provider, is set to launch their (first one around?) Facebook-based affiliate marketing platform.

Zibaba "Social Affiliates"

The network is scheduled to launch at the end of January 2011. Both merchants and affiliates are gonna be charged to participate (between $20 and $100 a month “depending on their number of Likes and how many products they want to sell”). InsideFacebook.com has more:

Affiliate marketers will be able to choose items from any existing Zibaba merchant, agree to a revenue sharing or CPA system, and sell these products from a storefront on their own Facebook Page.

Page storefronts help brands monetize their Likes. Directing these fans off of Facebook in order to make purchases raises a barrier to conversion…

This is where Zibaba, within its Facebook-based storefronts comes in. Now they’re taking it a step further, seeking to embed the performance marketing model into the process as well. InsideFacebook.com continues:

Similar to affiliate portals outside of Facebook such as ClickBank and ShareASale, merchants offer an incentive to affiliates such as 25% of revenue or $2.00 per lead. Affiliates then leverage their existing Facebook audience or send traffic to their branded storefront through advertising.

For consumers, the storefronts are easy to browse and search. Social features include the ability for users to Like and comment on products, and publish these actions to their stream. If users Like the Page hosting the storefront, they can receive a 10% discount on their purchases.

Here are just a few examples of Zibaba-powered storefronts (aka Z-Shops): Interflora | Deja Vu Cosmetics | Wolverhampton Wanderers FC | Shudoo. At this time Zibaba doesn’t offer a universal shopping cart which would work across different Z-Shops, but adding such a functionality is in the company’s plans.

I remember at least two affiliate marketers (Chelsea Osoling and Sharon Mostyn) predicting a closer affiliate integration with social in 2011, and this is definitely getting us a huge step closer to it. Will affiliates be happy to pay is a big question though. Will we see similar free-for-affiliates platforms/networks springing up soon thereafter? Time will show, but in the meantime we’ll be monitoring how things develop on Zibaba’s front.

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