The other day we stumbled on a post by Vardaan, a tech blogger from India, who posted a link pointing to the Qoof video ecommerce widget. Qoof is a company out of Israel that is pioneering the combination of ecommerce within video - essentially promotional videos with overlay product information and “Buy Now” button.linking to the online retailer.
It’s a nice concept, yet we noticed that if you want to start your own video promotion, you have to contact a Qoof sales rep, which suggests that the system is not built to be easily self-service administered by the user, like loading up videos and then matching overlay info & purchase links to specific points in time on the video. It’ll be very interesting to see this space further develop with easy-to-use instant setup “video shops”.
What is great though is that Qoof has an affiliate program in place, although also not self-service, for publishers that can earn comission from sales made over their sites. This is great and falls in the same direction of what we’re trying to do with our own widget technology. It seems that along with PayPal widget eCommerce beta, Amazon widget, eBay widget, ShopIt & Qoof, widgetized ecommerce will finally become more mainstream in 2009 and the ones which support affiliate programs may start making inroads into replacing banner/text ads as the prime monetization method for publishers.
