Lycos-owned Tripod, Inc. today announced it signed an electronic commerce agreement with Barnes & Noble under which barnesandnoble.com becomes the exclusive bookseller for the Web-based community.
In addition, Lycos, Inc. said it extended a previous agreement with barnesandnoble.com naming it the lead book retailer on Lycos. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Barnes & Noble joins Tripod’s Affiliate Network distribution program under which the reported 1.6 million members of Tripod’s community site can sell books from barnesandnoble.com through their Tripod personal home pages. When a virtual “personal” store sells a book, the host member gets a barnesandnoble.com credit.
Tripod said this e-commerce strategy is similar in structure to an agreement established with music e-tailer CDnow under which members can sell CDs through the creation of personal music outlets using a special Tripod template. Tripod plans to offer users a barnesandnoble.com template to develop personal book commerce sections for their home pages.
In addition, Tripod announced it will promote barnesandnoble.com throughout various areas of the site, including its Entertainment Zone and related
communities of interest called “pods.” Promotion to members wishing to
join barnesandnoble.com’s affiliate network will be featured on the Tripod
Homepage Builder area which will offer the personal bookstore template.
“This alliance with barnesandnoble.com is yet another significant
achievement for Tripod in the area of e-commerce,” said Bo Peabody, CEO of Tripod. “This agreement showcases the strength of Tripod’s loyal community
of personal homepage builders for e-commerce providers. By allowing users
to sell products like books on their own sites, Tripod users become
entrepreneurs overnight.”
“Our current affiliate program has more than 10,000 participants,” said Jeff Killeen, chief operating officer of barnesandnoble.com. “With this relationship with Tripod and its more than 1.6 million members, we are expecting to significantly increase our traffic, visibility and distribution.”
barnesandnoble.com entered the online book selling field late in the game according to some analysts, and has yet to gain the e-commerce reach of
chief competitor Amazon.com. Until the introduction of barnesandnoble.com, the Seattle-based site enjoyed unrivaled success in the Web-based book selling space for some time.
On June 11, Amazon also announced its expansion into the online music retailing arena where it will compete with top dogs CDnow and N2K.
