Mediastores enables anyone to build their own online store for free, selling their choice from over one million Books, DVDs and CDs and earn 20% commission. The full build your own service will launch in Spring 2008 but the first five mediastores to demonstrate the concept have recently gone live grouped around the charity Double Gift campaign.

Mediastores Ltd started life as Eclector Ltd, a company set up in 2005 by William Pryor and Simon Thompson, with one outside investor, to sell books through their variant of an affiliate retailing scheme, the basic model that powers Mediastores today. Eclector, in turn, grew out William’s experience of trying to get Floot.com - an etailer of specialist music - flying well before its time, at the turn of this century.

Version One of the Eclector platform, enabling people – with a lot of help from us – to build their own online bookstores was up and running at the end of 2005. Clunky though it was, our few beta-test partners were selling books which were fulfilled quickly and efficiently. But we needed a completely new software platform if we were to be part of the Long Tail, Web 2.0 revolution, a platform that enabled ordinary mortals to build attractive and easy-to-use mediastores quickly and easily and one that could deliver music and film as well as books. And for that we needed investment.

Mike Jackson found the company in the summer of 2006, initially as investor, but he got on so well with William at their first meeting, that he accepted his invitation to become Managing Director, as well as making a significant investment in the business. One of Mike’s first suggestions was to change the name to the much more obvious, it-does-what-it-says-on-the-tin, “Mediastores”.

Late in 2006 work was started on building Version Two in the Ruby on Rails environment. After some inevitable hiccoughs, we have launched five high volume Charity Mediastores for Christmas 07 followed by the launch of the build your own service in Spring 08. We have also been joined by Sam Uretsky, a veteran of big-time web development in the USA, based in Los Angeles, who is going to be pioneering Mediastores in North America.