The Internet has become the ultimate democracy in many ways, leveling the publishing playing field for writers with blogging software, allowing musical acts to distribute music without a record label and giving video producers outlets such as YouTube. With e-commerce outlets such as eBay, anyone can sell virtually anything.
Zlio.com, a France-based startup that launched in the US recently, hopes to make e-commerce even more open and grassroots, by enabling anyone - even would-be e-tailers who don't have a product to sell - to set up an online store in a matter of minutes.
"We set out to help the Internet user to sell online, even if they don't know what they want to sell," Zlio founder and CEO Jeremie Berrebi told the E-Commerce Times. "A lot of people are spending a lot of time on eBay buying, who may be interested in being on the other side but don't know what to sell."
Zlio got started in 2006, not long after Berrebi sold his first startup, a Web news search firm called "Net2One," to a French media monitoring firm. Mangrove Capital Partners - known for being the first institutional investor in Skype - has given backing to the startup. To date, it has nearly a quarter-million stores set up on its platform, the majority of them in France.
The Zlio platform enables users to set up a personalised niche shop and then to choose from thousands of products made available through some 350 merchant partners, including 150 in the US. End-users get a slice of Zlio's commission whenever a sale is made.
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