About Me 0052: Affiliate Making Money

When you think of social shopping, you likely envision the group buying phenomenon made popular by Groupon and LivingSocial. But there are dozens of other services out there that offer a social experience for consumers looking for products and services. We’ve compiled a list of five social shopping services that you’ve never heard of, so you can get a taste of the variety of ways you can buy online.

DoTogether

The DoTogether Mall is integrated into Facebook, making it easy for consumers to purchase products and services without having to visit third-party sites. After installing the Mall on your Facebook account, you can browse thousands of products in dozens of categories. And the great thing about this social shopping experience is that you can invite your Facebook friends in on the action, getting their opinion of that blouse or laptop you’re considering buying.

Snatter

Snatter’s premise is simple: find an offer, post your status, get a discount. They leverage people’s existing social networks to spread the word about the products, services and deals they offer, while giving consumers who share via Twitter or Facebook a discount in return. The discounts aren’t necessarily as deep as group buying social shopping sites, but they include things like 10% off home decor, $5 off orders of $25 or more of baby toys, and 15% off organic bamboo t-shirts.

myShopanion

myShopanion is a mobile app for the iPhone that offers social features to brick-and-mortar shopping. Users who are out and about can scan barcodes or perform keyword searches to find out what others are saying about that particular product. They can also use the app to connect with their friends across social networks and get real-time advice. And lastly, shoppers can use the app to compare prices of the product they are considering purchasing, to find the best deal out there.

Stuffpit

Stuffpit incentivizes social shopping by offering consumers money for recommending products to their friends. Consumers can add their favorite products or deals to Stuffpit, and then recommend them via an affiliate link on their social networks. Earning commission for sharing online deals is a great way to make social shopping both fun and lucrative, and although Stuffpit isn’t the only service to offer this feature, it is a successful model.

DealRadar

DealRadar is a group buying aggregator. It combs through dozens of daily deal and group buying sites and compiles all the deals in one place. This is useful if you find yourself spending half an hour every morning flipping from bookmarked daily deals site to daily deals site to find something that piques your interest. The Toronto offerings on DealRadar, for instance, includes 18 separate sites with the deals categorized into “Beauty & Spas”, “Food & Drink”, “Fitness & Nutrition” and more.

When Ping launched in early September, the music social network had one major problem: it wasn’t social. Sure, you can share stuff inside of iTunes, but there was no good way to post the songs you liked to the two big social networks: Facebook and Twitter. The truth is that Ping launched with Facebook Connect integration, but it was only for contact importing, and then Apple and Facebook had a bit of a dust up. Today, Apple is bringing Twitter integration to Ping.

As Twitter has just announced on their blog, by connecting iTunes to Twitter, you’ll be able to not only find your Twitter friends on Ping, but you’ll be able to tweet out Ping activity as well. That last bit is a key to making Ping actually work in a truly social way.

Perhaps even more interesting is that not only will each tweet contain a link back to the song or album on iTunes, but these links will work in New Twitter’s right-side pane. You’ll be able to listen to iTunes previews right from there — a huge feature that should lead to a lot of music buying, especially when the 90-second previews kick-in.

Facebook, meanwhile, is still MIA after they cut off Ping a day after launch. There’s talk the two side will hook up again, but so far it hasn’t happened yet. That said, there is a button in the drop down to manually post a song or album to Facebook, but it takes you to Facebook on the web to do it. The Twitter integration is fully baked-in.

This first big social integration follows Apple integrating Ping with users’ actual iTunes libraries, an important first step.

Twitter says this iTunes song previews feature will be available on twitter.com in the 23 countries where the iTunes Store offers music.

One big word of caution, when you first hook up your Twitter account to Ping, the default is to auto-tweet out all of your Ping activity — both when you post something and when you just “like” something. It alerts you to this at first and you can change it in your settings so that you can manually choose when to do it, just be warned that this happens.

I have to wonder if this deal is a money-making one for Twitter. Will they be getting affiliate fees for songs purchased thanks to Twitter links? I’ve asked Twitter that very question and will update when I hear back.

Update: Says Twitter on the affiliate fees:

We don’t comment on the underlying financials of our partnerships.

Friday, 19 November 2010

Affiliate Making Money

DoTogether

Snatter

myShopanion

Stuffpit

DealRadar

DoTogether

Snatter

myShopanion

Stuffpit

DealRadar

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