Shopier

I just came across this site from Chitika called Shoplinc. I must say that Chitika is really innovating in online advertising once more. The eminimalls program in my opinion was just brilliant despite all the problems and publishers complaints. Don’t forget that Chitika is actually a relatively new company and definetely not a company with the financial power of Google. Anyway back to our topic, the Chitika shoplinc. Shoplinc looks like an online mall a lot like the large ammount of Amazon affiliate stores all over the internet or like the ones I have created for these blog (Check sidebar under shops).
Now lets look at some of the points of the Shoplinks overview.

Incremental revenue beyond advertising via merchandising: Your ShopLinc will feature revenue-earning paid listings, promotions, and offers from name brand merchants, generating additional revenue to supplement your current ad revenue.

Forgive me if I don’t understand this completely but I am not a native English speaker. The way I hear this is that merchants will have the ability to buy featured listings at specific sites and blogs and the owner of the site will then receive a commission irrespectively of whether the ads were clicked, or any products were bought. Something like CPM advertising but my guess is that the price will be monthly and will not depend on number of views. (just guessing here)

Maintained by Chitika, “remote” controlled by you: Your custom ShopLinc store will be based on your own RSS feed, and hence will feature products that are relevant to your website content.

This means that the featured products will be chosen algorithmically according to the content of the site. The contextual nature of the ads means that they can’t be used along with adsense or YPN. Anyway, since the shoplincs will be hosted by Chitika (see below) that was out of the question to begin with. Now if you are wondering if you will be able to use adsense at the rest of your site the answer is yes. According to the adsense TOS

We do not permit Google ads or search boxes accessing Google search services to be published on web pages that also contain what could be considered competing ads or services.

Notice that it says web pages not web sites (disclaimer: This is just a personal opinion, you should always contact google when in doubt)

Hosted by Chitika, mapped to your own domain: Your ShopLinc will be mapped to your domain, and based on your website template. Hence, your ShopLinc will have the same look and feel as your website, providing a good user experience to your site visitors.

So the shoplincs will be hosted by chitika and they will be mapped to your domain. So you will get a subdomain in the form http://shoplinc.yourdomainhere.com . This is really good for people that don’t have a lot of technical knowledge to setup an affiliate store like the amazon ones (I was always wondering why Amazon wasn’t doing something like that) plus it saves you the money of buying a script like the one I bought for my stores. One thing that I am wodering is if you would be able to change the name of your subdomain, for example if you have a site about mp3 players instead of using shoplink.yourdomain.com to use mp3players.yourdomain.com. That would probably help from a SEO point of view. Oh! and they will match it to suit you design, what more can you ask for?

Some final thoughts: According to the above Chitika will read your RSS feed in order to decide what kind of products to add to your shoplinc, that makes it ideal for blogs and to be honest it seems to me that Chitika created this new service mainly having blogs in mind.

Oh and let’s not forget the Eligibility Criteria:

Represent merchandising related specialty content such as product reviews, recommendations, discussions, etc. ShopLincs are not a good match for portals, search engines, and sites with minimal content but with links to other people’s content.

Consist of English content only. We are currently not offering this service to sites with non-English content

If you want to try it you should send an email Chitika. You can find the email and more information here.

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Also don’t forget to check the reviews, here are some extracts

This is a beautiful sounding and powerful AVR receiver/Amp. The sound is clear, strong, and has great depth.

Forget the Watts… this baby delivers more punch (at a greater clarity) at 75 watts than any 100 watt receiver you find from dennon, sony, or kenwood (especially since it is high current). Where the AVR 635 really shines is in the combination of ease of setup and flexibility of configuration.