When Wigix rolled out in Beta in April, it was focused on a structured-data catalog approach to its site in order to give sellers and shoppers more power and flexibility in how they searched for and sorted listings. Now that the company has built up the catalog with 1.5 million pages (a great many submitted by users), it has moved on to phase two of its plan: build up inventory. Wigix announced two new programs to populate the marketplace with listings for sale - Storefronts and a new affiliate program.

The launch of Storefronts allows sellers to build and brand their own customized online shops. Merchants who set up a Storefront before March 31, 2009, will receive a free Storefront for one year.

The Wigix Storefront allows large quantities of products to be uploaded, tracked, promoted and updated through a point-and-click interface. eBay sellers can use the company's eBay Import Wizard to import listings into their Wigix store. The wizard uses the eBay API so sellers can simply enter their eBay User ID, review their listings, and indicate which ones to import into Wigix.

Sellers can keep shoppers within their stores. Wigix co-founder and CEO James Chong said, "It's important to our sellers that we aren't distracting shoppers during their time on specific Storefronts, therefore, shoppers won't see other similar merchandise from other Storefronts or the catalog. It will keep the customer's total focus on the shopping experience until they are ready to leave a specific store."

You can peruse the category list to see how many products reside in each category. (These are not necessarily items for sale.) On Monday, there were 21,597 products listed in Jewelry; 907,577 in Books; and 8,259 in Video Games.

In addition to Storefronts, Wigix is also launching an Affiliate Program. Affiliates can make money without selling merchandise by either referring new members to the Wigix site or recommending products from Wigix customers on their websites or blogs. The program offers a three-tiered network reward system that allows members to earn a constant revenue stream. Tier 1 rewards users 4% of shared revenue; Tier 2, 2%; and Tier 3, 1%. The monies paid out are based on revenue earned by Wigix through advertising and completed transactions.

http://www.wigix.com/index.php/wigix