Sounds grand!

I remember my first attempts at e-commerce with what used to be Linkshare in 1998.

Found a free HTML-based page creator site (with LOTS of ads surrounding it and few features) and used link-offers from a bunch of Linkshare vendors. They'd come visit and either give me constructive feedback or would just invalidate the links to signal disapproval.

Art.com was a vendor and I set up a mini gallery with a link to a wine and cheese site I had. Got kudos for the innovative thinking. I even made a little bit of money.