The founder of OblinQ contacted me and asked for a review, so here are my first impressions. Keep in mind that this isn’t based on an extensive use of the site.
The purpose of OblinQ is to allow you to set up your own online store. This is similar to Bravisa and Zlio.
What distinguishes OblinQ is that you don’t have a list of products you can offer, instead you can go to any web store and offer products from that store through your OblinQ store. They have a toolbar extension you can install, and then when you’re on another store (such as Amazon.com), you can choose to add a product there to your store. This allows you to build up a list of personal recommendations.
Of course, you’ll get a commission on most items when someone buys them through your store. The site itself doesn’t contain a lot of information on how commissions work. To get commissions from Amazon, you have to enter your Amazon Associate’s ID, so presumably you’re getting those paid directly from Amazon. For other stores, I’d guess that OblinQ is collecting commissions and paying some percentage back to you (an update from Rahul, the founder…OblinQ passes 100% of the commission back to you).
They do have a feature that allows you to enter you own affiliate links, if you have an account at a suitable service such as Commission Junction. For those, the commissions would go directly through the service.
One of the nice things in the stores themselves is that OblinQ uses Shopping.com to do a price comparison for your shoppers, and provide a list of where a product can be bought and for how much. Another fun feature is the ability to include YouTube videos in your store. This could be used to provide some of your own how-to videos showing products being used, or just to include something fun for your visitors.
There’s also a recent partnership with Bravisa that allows you to easily sell your Bravisa products at your OblinQ store. This is important because your profit margins on Bravisa products are higher than your profit selling through affiliate links. But you can provide alternatives to your Bravisa products, so that you get the sale no matter what.
All in all, OblinQ is a nice service for setting up an online store. They do need some spots for inserting analytics code, tying into Google’s webmaster tools, etc, and some how-to guides would also be a great addition. But if you use the toolbar plugin to add new products to your store, you can’t go too far wrong.