Affiliate Window has released a new Facebook application that allows shoppers to add product to a wishlist on the social networking site. The shoppers earn a kickback from anyone who buys through those links, so there’s a strong incentive fr anyone to use and promote their list.

At first sight it’s a great little tool that merchants will love to use to promote their products, but some are less than impressed.

The tool first reared it’s head on The Inquirer who panned it for adding to the rising tide of commercially-driven applications on Facebook.
Then yesterday an entry on the Affiliate Window blog and an email to AW merchants went into more detail about the tool.

A thread on the A4u Forum quickly developed, questioning the wisdom of a network launching an application like this. The main issue is the cashback element of the application, which effectively creates the potential of a mini cashback site for every Facebook user. Cashback sites are not best loved by a large number of affiliates as they are perceived to ’steal’ the sale which ‘content’ affiliates have made.

I thought I’d try to look at this from all angles and try to predict the impact it will have…

The Merchant

From a merchant perspective this looks like a great initiative. It opens up a new channel for stores for whom a wish-list function would have been pointless. e.g. A wedding list at Currys would be daft, but mix it up with a bunch of other stores and it becomes more useful for the user, and more likely to be used.

There are some reservations about the cashback element, but if it gets potential customers promoting a product to people who can then buy it, the balance is all in how many incremental sales are made. If the tool only gets picked up by people already familiar with online marketing it won’t add a lot, but get the mass market of savvy Facebook users onto it and the volume of recommended product on there will make a nice lift in sales.

The Network

Networks have a responsibility to innovate to create incremental sales for merchants and recruit new affiliates to the channel - job done I’d say, but they also have a responsibility to develop their existing affiliates, and by throwing open the doors for all and sundry to create their own cashback sites there are plenty of cookies getting overwritten.

Don’t forget though that Buy.at have been doing this for years with their ‘charity’ sites.

The consumer

Greedy teenagers the world over can now shout ‘I want I want I want’ through their facebook pages, the more commercially savvy ones will spam the daylights out of their mates, and clueless Grannies will be spared the embarrasment of buying their loved ones last year’s big thing at Christmas.

I’m already picking out some items from Evans Cycles before my birthday next month so I can drop some heavy hints.

The affiliate

Probably the only loser in the game.

Aside from the green eyed envy that I didn’t do it first I’m now worried that the cookies from my planned cycle reviews website are going to get overwritten by my Facebook app that I set up with my consumer hat on, at best I’ll only get half the commission in that case, and if thing takes off I’m sure plenty of people will just start up fake profiles and start buying through their own links, overwriting the cookies that were dropped by my painstaking review writing and price research.

The affiliate’s love of these applications is proportional to their ability to make money from them, maybe if AW added in a second-tier bonus, giving me a lifetime cut of everyone I recruit to the application then I’d be a bit happier about it.

However this morning I bet there are plenty of affiliates playing with the tool, trying to work out how they could make a better one that works across merchants all networks.