PayPal Australia has recruited a group of Australia’s most popular fashion and design bloggers for its news online shopping community project, Lustable.

Lustable is giving money to the bloggers to spend online, in any online store using any checkout system, and commissioning them to write blog-style articles on their experiences.

Carly Jacobs, from fashion blog smagglestyle.com, was drafted for Lustable and is so far enjoying the freedom of the project.

“This is not the first time Ive been approached from my site Smaggle to write for another site but its the first time Ive been offered an opportunity that has any degree of integrity,” Jacobs tells Marketing magazine. “I can promote products, designers and stores that I like not ones that Im being paid to like. Its also a dream gig. Im having a ball!”

The current bloggers are locked in for 12 weeks, but PayPal head of communications Adrian Christie hopes to make the online community an ongoing project.

“We’re really happy with how it’s going so far,” he tells Marketing magazine. “We’ve got a large following and good click-throughs on the links. We’re really proud to have been able to offer this to our consumers and for people to engage and we’re proud to help some of our merchants have an outlet to share their deals and products with people interested in fashion.”

Without any spend on promotion, the site has already amassed around 700 Facebook ‘likes’ in just over a week. Christie believes the success so far has come from providing a niche service that didn’t exist.

“We recognized a group of passionate fashion shoppers who didn’t have a location to share what to find, where to get it, and what price,” he says

“We wanted to host that conversation, provide a location for people to bring those experiences to the fore. We are looking to share with readers what we do with the equation as well, so we’re littering the site with messages from PayPal that are relevant to the conversation.”

Christie says the site was also intended to show the good and bad of online shopping.

“All the bloggers are getting is money to shop. It was an opportunity for them to go wild, make people aware of good places to shop and bad places to shop and come back and tell people about it.”