Cartfly is an online e-commerce widget platform that allows anyone to setup an online store and then embed that store wherever they want - a Facebook page, blog, website etc... The widget is a Flex widget, complete with shopping cart. When you check out, the user is sent to a PayPal page to pay for the items in their cart. Cartfly takes 3% of the total price as their cut.

Creating a store and adding products is done inside a Flex application. You can set some basic properties for your store, like a custom logo, font colours, etc... and add as many products as you want. Once your store is setup, you can select how you want to share the store - and code for embedding it is provided to you.

The idea is good, but the stores that are created don't look that great (in my opinion). Also, the buying experience isn't that great - PayPal requires customers to visit their HTML site to pay. This means that customers will go from a Flex interface to an HTML page - not very nice, and not very well integrated (this is a PayPal limitation for the most part, not a Cartfly... Although with PayPal Pro (only in the US) you could keep them in the Flex application without sending them to the HTML page.) One of the benefits of an RIA is keeping the user engaged in the RIA through checkout, something not being done in this case.

As I said though, the idea is good. I'd like to see something similar for Amazon or my eBay auctions. (Maybe someone will do that for the eBay widget contest.)

Via Venture Beat.