PopShops evolved--and continues to evolve--organically to make life easier for anyone who participates in the affiliate industry. Here's how it all started...
With over 14 years of product design and usability experience at Northwest technology companies like Microsoft, Expedia, and Zillow, Jessie Jones was ready for a change. Interested in working from home to spend more time with her baby and curious about affiliate marketing, she began setting up niche, online shops in an attempt to earn affiliate commissions as a revenue source. Easier said than done, it turned out.
She was stunned to learn how difficult it was to grab products across networks, how quickly the information became stale, how many typos ruined the tracking, and how confusing it was to navigate all of the different affiliate networks. It became evident that she was going to be spending much more time dealing with technical problems than promoting her niche sites.
What was missing, she realized, was a set of easy-to-use tools that anyone--regardless of technical ability--could use to add relevant products to their website or blog. Jessie's background in product design gave her the inspiration to create the tool set that would become PopShops, but she knew she'd need help turning her concept into reality.
A sequence of lucky events followed: Jessie was introduced to Dan Harms, a talented, UI-focused Ruby on Rails/AJAX developer with an entrepreneurial bent who had just finished taking some time off to raise his children. Then, from the heavens (via craigslist), came Angel Djambazov: experienced affiliate manager from Onlineshoes.com, recipient of the highly coveted 2006 Affiliate Manager of the Year Award, and, as one blogger called him, "an Affiliate Legend." The final stroke of luck came when Eric Artzt, a long-time friend and program manager extraordinaire from Microsoft, reconnected with Jones and jumped on board. Together, in true agile development style with many site iterations, they refined the concepts behind PopShops along with much valuable input from early beta users, newbies and power affiliates alike.
The team formally launched PopShops to the world in July 2007. A few months later, Jessie's husband Matt stepped in to help with all things merchant-related, including adding new product feeds, removing defunct ones, and keeping affiliates apprised of both.
PopShops.com is a proud part of the creative, exciting Seattle technology startup movement. PopShops's ongoing mission is to create a useful and user-friendly set of affiliate power tools, and to have fun doing it. PopShops is headquartered in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, Washington.