Holly Moly, what's with MOLI?

There's a new provider in the cloud and they're MOLI:

Finally there's a way to create and maintain a website for your business without the headaches and expense! MOLI makes it easy for you to put your business online in minutes.Business Offer :: members only :: MOLI ::

The deal is for a free, small site business site, with some interesting features. This is an online community, in the Facebook/My Space vein, but instead of a profile page with links to news and so forth, you use the profiles to create web sites that can be have various degrees of access and can be used for small businesses. What's interesting is that these sites appear on a community portal to which has public and membership access controls. This is on top of private, more secure profiles. The important point is that these businesses exist within a Web 2.0 environment where collaboration, social networking and so forth are expected.

While I'm sure MOLI is not completely unique, it's the first social site I've seen that's intended to foster commerce within the online community. Setting up a store is all but painless - you do have to have a credit card and an account at PayPal or Google Checkout, though you can set one up while creating your store. (While MOLI is free, having a store costs $3.99 a month. (PayPal or Google Checkout fees are not included. I'm sure there are other MOLI-fees, I've not looked that closely.) Then create your site using the fairly good online tools and you have a store. Since you're within a community environment, you have a ready made environment to market your store. The financial message is pretty good too: typical fees from Google or PayPal will be 1 to 1.5%, though Google is free until the end of the year, so, keeping the math simple, the $3.99 fee at 1% of sales means four hundred dollars in sales, plus another four to six dollars and your cost of sales for $400 in goods is only $10. Of course you do have to have the goods and get them to your customers, but you can charge for shipping and handling, so that's still a good deal. One thing you apparently can't do is sell digital content for direct download. You'll have to make some other arrangements for that business model. Storage capacity and intellectual property issues are probably affecting these features for now.

So why is Edison interested in a social community site? It's not in our usual coverage areas -we're interested in enterprise computing after all. I think MOLI is the start of a whole new way of on-line selling. It's an extension of what Amazon does with all it's vendors, but here you have your own shop at the mall. The hot graphics, stylish interface, ability to present video and other content types, the social networking and other Web 2.0 contexts all are coming together to change how people shop and sell.

I expect to see more and more MOLI like features on the regular shopping sites over the next year. MOLI is just the first I've seen.