I love it. It sounds like a few people here have been thinking about a similar idea, and you can count me in as well. The truth is, my company would be happy to pay out 10% of any order if it resulted from a genuine recommendation. Of course anyone experienced with the affiliate world can figure out a way to capture that money, but it's not really available to your everyday Facebook user. Maybe Refer.ly will fix that. Using Viglink is smart.
Unfortunately, the ecommerce company for which I work has had to completely abandoned affiliate marketing. Almost all of our affiliate fees were going to scammers who were using Google Adwords and bidding on our brand terms. Of course that was against our policy, but we had no way of stopping them out of the gate. They would even copy our exact ad so that when we searched our own name, it would appear at a glance that it was in fact our ad showing up (same display URL and everything). Eventually we just had to shut the whole thing down. I hope Refer.ly can figure out a way to avoid these scammers. I imagine it will be difficult.
With this business model, I wonder if it's possible to act as an aggregator for the Amazon affiliate system? Amazon pays out a higher percentage based on how much volume you bring in. If Refer.ly acted as a single affiliate with Amazon, but they in turn paid out affiliates to thousands of different Refer.ly users, then each user would then be getting the highest possible affiliate percentage from Amazon, right? Because together they would qualify for the volume bonus. I haven't looked into it, but I'm guessing Amazon must have some rule against this.
I wouldn't start with amazon associates, there are plenty of smaller affiliate networks who would love to help out and promote this service.
Amazon associates presents a big tracking challenge because their system seems to be designed to give up as little data as possible. It is by far the hardest network I have come across to login as a user and retrieve transaction data in an automated way.
The thing is affiliate marketing has a ridiculously low ROI if you're NOT bidding or ranking for brand terms... for most products, especially if you're a no-name.
Affiliate marketing is a huge business - it's why DoubleClick, ValueClick, LinkShare are such huge profitable companies - millions are generated through affiliates every year. The dirty secret is that 90% of that revenue comes from people already searching for that brand, not through new discovery. Think coupon sites: People searching for Newegg coupons obviously already plan to buy it from NewEgg.
Unfortunately, the ecommerce company for which I work has had to completely abandoned affiliate marketing. Almost all of our affiliate fees were going to scammers who were using Google Adwords and bidding on our brand terms. Of course that was against our policy, but we had no way of stopping them out of the gate. They would even copy our exact ad so that when we searched our own name, it would appear at a glance that it was in fact our ad showing up (same display URL and everything). Eventually we just had to shut the whole thing down. I hope Refer.ly can figure out a way to avoid these scammers. I imagine it will be difficult.
With this business model, I wonder if it's possible to act as an aggregator for the Amazon affiliate system? Amazon pays out a higher percentage based on how much volume you bring in. If Refer.ly acted as a single affiliate with Amazon, but they in turn paid out affiliates to thousands of different Refer.ly users, then each user would then be getting the highest possible affiliate percentage from Amazon, right? Because together they would qualify for the volume bonus. I haven't looked into it, but I'm guessing Amazon must have some rule against this.