Shopping Links is a new online marketplace in the United States especially for the beauty, fashion and lifestyle industries.
The high-tech ShoppingLinks.com platform connects brands and bloggers to streamline logistics, negotiations and other collaboration elements, ensuring that both parties achieve their marketing goals. Blogger profiles are linked with their social-media channels and site analytics, while brands can post collaborations of all kinds—paid and unpaid—to promote anything from a consumer product to an interactive experience, with specific criteria for whom they’d like to work with and how the collaboration will manifest.
Where other influencer-marketing solutions offer subscription-based platforms or require liaising with large-scale talent-management agencies, Shopping Links collaborations are accessible for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Opportunities can be posted for a one-time fee, and the brand has the option of working with any number of the influencers who meet their predetermined criteria—most of whom will proactively apply and are already agreeing to the terms put forth by the brand. The Shopping Links platform has fully integrated measurement tools and works with affiliate marketing platforms, so both the brand and the blogger are able to use click-through and engagement data for their overall marketing strategies.
Shopping Links was founded by Kim Westwood in Melbourne, Australia, in 2014 and came out of beta in the United States for brands and bloggers this past November. A PR-agency function is slated to launch by early 2016—although the platform is already being used by many PR and digital-marketing agencies in the United States on behalf of their clients.
[Image courtesy of Shopping Links]