MyPickList is somewhat like an Amazon list, except you get money on commissions when people buy products through your list. It’s basically like being an Amazon affiliate, except that you’re not limited to only Amazon, but a plethora of merchants, including Best Buy, iTunes, and Barnes & Noble.

Once becoming a member, you can create lists either by manually adding them, or using a toolbar button that can automatically obtain information from a product page (like Amazon). You are then encouraged to give a review of the item and rate it. Once you build your list, you can broadcast it to places like your blog or website, and hopefully generate some income when people of similar tastes buy products through your list. Your list will also show when people browse to a specific item that your list contains.

MyPickList also injects some social networking by allowing comments on items, alerting you when common items appear on other people’s lists, and giving you the ability to add friends in the network. But the foundation of MyPickList is the list itself, which they hope you will broadcast to as many places as possible. All earned commissions will go straight to your Paypal account, which is a requirement for participating.

MyPickList is attempting to create a social commerce network website based on word-of-mouth (aka lists). The commission rates vary from merchant to merchant, and can be as low as 1.0% (Buy.com) to as high as 6.0% (shoebuy.com). I know for a fact that being an Amazon Associate gets you a 4.0% commission rate to start with, as opposed to the 2.5% that MyPickList gives you. This gives you an idea of how much MyPickList takes off the top, which I am pegging at around 1.5% to 2%.

I could see this service being great for people who have a very focus set of tastes. If a user can garner enough fans for their list, they could probably do pretty well for themselves. But, for some of the merchants like Netflix, the product is too horizontal to be worthwhile for the average user. If someone doesn’t already have a Netflix account, I don’t think I will be the one to persuade them to get one. But if the product is an obscure indie pop band, I might be able to persuade someone to explore that purchase more easily.

In essence, MyPickList is empowering the average user who doesn’t get a lot of traffic to their website (or who doesn’t even have one) to get ad revenues for products they enjoy. But, for someone who is savvy enough to create and market their own website with a focus on consumer products, they could do better by becoming an Amazon Associate, or something of an equivalent nature elsewhere.

MyPickList’s business model is a good one: let your users advertise for you.

This entry was posted by James Yu on Friday, May 19th, 2006 at and is filed under MyPickList. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.