Interesting post in the TechCrunch Forums this morning about Zlio, a startup that lets people create their own shops and sell goods from Amazon and other ecommerce services. Jeremie Berrebi, the CEO of Zlio, emailed users to let them know that Amazon will no longer allow them to promote Amazon products on Zlio shops.
It also seems that Amazon stopped paying affiliate fees on sales a week ago. This is a highly unusual move since Amazon generally wants all the affiliates it can get. Chances are that one of two things happened – either Amazon is getting into this business directly, or Zlio was involved in some sort of fraud. We’ll see what Amazon has to say about this.
Update: We haven’t heard from Amazon, but Zlio looks to be in direct competition with aStore, a new service from Amazon. See Centernetwork’s coverage here from late last year. Zlio actually launched the same day as aStore. That still isn’t a good explanation as to why Amazon has shut them off, however.