Calgary-based Shopster.com has launched what it says is the world's largest online merchant network. The good news? A basic account is free.

The new site will enable merchants to build a store and network with other members. Company co-founder Sarath Samarsekera calls it social networking for your products.

"Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn struggle to monetize, but the Shopster network is about making money for our users which aligns our interests," says Samarasekera. "Your success is our success, and it's free to join, so there really is no risk."

Like many other successful online apps that target business users, monetization will come when a user upgrades to a PowerMerchants account, which currently costs $69.95 per month. (You will get 4 months for free if you sign-up for a full year; it is not clear if this will be an ongoing or introductory offer.)

The site also charges a transaction fee on all sales made through the network. You will pay a hefty 5 per cent with a basic account. The fee drops to 1 per cent for PowerMerchants.

Using the basic service a merchant can have up to 25 products in their store and list those products on the network, get sales and order reporting and access add-on services such as a custom domain for $5 per month.

Power users can also customize their store templates, add a customer domain for free, do bulk product uploads and can have up to 1000 products in their store / list on the network. One of the biggest advantages of this account type is the significantly lower transaction fee.

There are a number of useful tools available to merchants.

From a marketing standpoint, the network has a number of features that will help you promote your products on eBay, do shopping comparisons with other leading sites and create store coupons.

The site also has a number of options that will help you take care of details like sales taxes and shipping costs in order to finalize the sale.

One interesting aspect of the site is the merchant network. Still in beta mode, the idea behind the network is that you can sell products from other merchants on your store, which makes it like a 1-stop affiliate marketing centre for retailers.

However, the site needs to have more merchants signed on and better ways to find products in narrow categories for this to be effective. (A search for Canada brought up mostly US-based businesses, presumably because they included Canada as one of their keywords. A search for Toronto produced no results.)

Another suprising requirement is that all products must have both an image and a physical weight entered, indicating that the store is still very much focussed on tangible goods as opposed to things like e-books.

To learn more about the new network or to register your own account, visit www.shopster.com.

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