I was reading in the paper last week about the relative increase of online ecom shopping - a growth of about 11% over last year, and how Facebook has been helping fuel the rise in online spending. Recently, I published a post about how facebook briefly became the most popular website on the planet (outstripping Google, amazon and MSN in Christmas week last year).

This then got me thinking - what if facebook created an affiliate network. An easy to use app that integrates with an Ecom affiliate program and gives you money every time to refer someone to buy something. Technically, it would be relatively simple to do. If you use Paypal as the payment gateway, you avoid most of the costs of setting up banking systems etc, and then you could take payments from merchants into paypal and use those payments to reward your affiliates (taking a small percentage for yourself in the process). This could earn facebook several million dollars in annual revenue in one stroke. There are some ecom apps for facebook, but none of them have really taken off. What is needed is a meta comparison site (like google shopping) which can search several online stores for the same product (and also display the latest auction listings) and provide them in a more user friendly format than google shopping. Then you can include things like 'suggest to a friend' or 'build wedding gift list' type apps which earn affiliate commision. Again, not rocket science, and if you charged merchants a percentage of sale revenue to display their wares in Facebook Shopping, you'll be making millions. You never know, one day, facebook shopping could be more popular than ebay.

Just a thought.