A week or so ago, Peter Sewell of Zlio emailed me, asking if I would like to review the services offered at Zlio.com. He let me know that they had a new version in the works, too, but it won’t be ready until after the new year, and I was anxious to review something other than a blog. Today, I jumped in and started playing.
I started by signing up for a new account. I must admit that I got a little worried when I saw the second step in the process (shown below), but I laid the whole process out so you can see what I quickly learned: it’s relatively quick and painless. Honestly, I hate signing up for affiliate programs. It seems like it takes forever and there’s not a lot there to help me make the sale. Zlio, on the other hand, was actually not too bad. I was able to get my store running pretty quickly. Too bad it starts out without any products, but that’s a good thing, actually.
Next, I needed to select products to sell. Obviously, being a tech blog, I wanted some computers and electronics and cool stuff like that. This, however, is where Zlio has a lot of room for improvement. Finding the specific products I had in mind was not an easy task. The good news is that there’s hundreds of products to choose from for many categories. The bad news is that they’re not organized very well. The search is helpful, but only if you have a very specific result in mind. For example, I wanted to list products I would buy myself or that I already own, so decided to start with the laptop I bought earlier this year. When I viewed the Computers and Software category, I didn’t see any laptops at all. I then searched for “laptop” which returned 300 results. “sony” returned 300 results, as well, which means there’s probably a maximum of 300 results returned for any query. Still, I’m not about to poke through all 300, so I searched for “sony vaio” and got back 138 results. I finally found my laptop on page 8. On the other hand, when I searched for “apple ipod touch”, the first item was what I sought. Ultimately, though, the drill-down category method should be better organized, leaving search as a secondary option, or they should fine-tune the search. Within about 10 minutes, I had 9 products live in my store. This part of the setup was my only sore spot.
Once my store was filled with some products, I decided to poke around the rest of my control panel to see what they had to offer me. I half expected to be done, but I found a few more goodies. One of these is the ability to choose my revenue model. The choices are Pay Per Sale revenue model (A commission is earned for every successful sale that you contribute to), Pay Per Click revenue model (A commission is earned for every click on a merchant link from your ZlioShop – Not available yet), and Mixed remuneration (You earn commission per sale + per click). I chose the mixed. There’s also a section to fill out more details about yourself and include an image, internal blogs, commissions reports, alerts (so I get an email when I sell a product), community tools (this IS supposed to be “social shopping”, after all), ZlioLive (I have NO clue), and ZlioZone (as seen at right).
Clearly, these guys have put a lot of effort into their service and aside from the product discovery issues noted above, I think it’s very clean and easy to get rolling in a hurry. Something else I noticed is that they seem pretty active with their product offering and their interaction with members. Peter was good with his communication with me and they help promote members on their blog to keep people more involved. Will it make you money? I imagine anyone with enough traffic can make a few bucks with it and even more with the referral program, but I won’t know until I give it a little time. If I make any money with Zlio, you’ll likely see a follow-up post in January.
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