BooBox Launching Affiliate Tools for Blogs

Posted on January 21, 2007

TechCrunch reports that Brazil-based BooBox will be launching a tool to help bloggers sell products from their blogs using clickable images. With BooBox bloggers can add clickable graphics that when clicked open a window over the browser page that displays products that people can purchase. For example, when a photograph of a woman wearing sunglasses is a clicked a window opens showing a selection of sunglasses. The purchase can be completed in the window that opens. Amazon.com is the retailer used in the online demo located at the bottom of the BooBox homepage. BooBox says it uses tags to control what products are shown when the image is clicked on.

You won't even feel it: you tag your image, we send it to the e-commerce website that send a list of possible itens related to your image. Each image tagged gets a booBox icon over it to show your audience where to click.

Presumably you would just tag your image as iPod, TMX Elmo or Versace sunglasses and BooBox's window will show related products when the image is clicked. In the demo you can see the small BooBox icon that gets placed on the images. BooBox likely also provides a snippet of code that bloggers will have to place somewhere on their blog to make the clickable images work.

TechCrunch gives the BooBox an early thumbs up but notes that it isn't clear whether or note they will charge for the service.

Since sites will be using their own affilate codes, booBox won't be able to directly take a cut of transactions. It isn't clear if they are launching this for free, or charging for the service. Pending their position on that, as well as details on how difficult this will be to integrate with websites, I'm giving this an early thumbs up. This may be quick acquisition bait for Amazon or eBay.

However, it seems pretty clear on the website that they do not plan to charge for use of the tool.

How Much Does It Cost To Use The BooBoxes?
For you, nothing. We want you to earn a lot of money with your blog.

There are some affiliate merchant tools like GoldenCan that utilize a 4th click feature where every 4th click is actually GoldenCan's affiliate link but the BooBox website does indicate any kind of 4th click implementation. Maybe they are planning some other feature or service they will charge for. Otherwise it is unclear how BooBox will profit from the implementation of their service.

The idea of linking graphical images to windows offering an array of products from an affiliate retail site is one that might work for some blogs. Michael Arrington said "I imagine Gadget and fashion sites, in particular, will be looking into this quite closely." One possible downside with an image-linked affiliate tool is that blog readers may not be used to clicking on images so they may ignore them. The product window will also need to be extremely easy for users to close so blog readers are not annoyed by it.