Zlio gives you a Web store, so you can make money

We’ve written about the emerging set of companies, like Agloco and eMax, that promise to make you wealthier as you surf the Web.

Zlio, of Paris, France, is the latest company that wants to help you make cash while you sit back and do nothing. It lets you create an online store, to sell just about anything from your web site. It gives you some simple tools to pick a shop name, design a template for your shop, and then select products from a catalogue — giving you a choice from more than 85 merchants in France, 35 in the U.S. Products range from NBA products to iPods and Spiderman paraphernalia.

Next month, Zlio will finish raising $3.5 million in venture capital, founder Jeremie Berribi tells VentureBeat.

Berrebi, 28, reports the tool has see significant growth in Europe. Since Sept., when the service launched, users have created 47,000 shops. About 450 new shops are being created every day. And the revenues are flowing: $50,000 last month, not bad for a company of seven employees.

You make money as follows: Zlio has cut deals with various merchants, including Yahoo Shopping Europe (Kelkoo), so that when customers buy products from your Zlio shop, you split the commission with Zlio. In France, Zlio also gets paid when users click on product links at the store, from which you also get a cut. That part will soon be available in the U.S., Berribi says.

Below is an example of a part of a Zlio store called Yoga Gifts Select. You can also customize a widget, so that it goes on your blog.

Berrebi became known in France for building Net2one, one of the first news search engines, which let you subsribe to articles carrying chosen keywords. He was 21 at the time.

Zlio started in 2005 as a way to let you recommend products to friends in exchange for a cut of a sale (like FavoriteThingz and MyPickList.com). But it wasn’t that effective: After a couple of friends bought that book you recommended, the sales were pretty much done. So Berribi junked the idea, in favor of Zlio. Zlio eventually will let you sell just about anything, he says. Amazon does something similar to this, but only lets you do it for Amazon products.

Chitika is another competitor, but it is mainly for use larger site owners (you have to apply, and Chitika recommends it for owners with at least 10,000 page views a month).