Affiliating

If you do not have anything worth selling or you would like to have some co-sales, consider being an affiliate for a major online retailer. In affiliation, you sell somebody else’s stuff through your website. Usually all the ugly details such as billing and shipping are handled by the retailer. Your job is to provide a lucrative storefront and forward your visitors or customers to buy something from the retailer. Sounds easy?

Of course, there is a catch. The revenues you’ll make with affiliation are not as high as they would be if you were having your own items on sale. Your profit margin is cut from their profit margin, and rest assured, your part is smaller.

Affiliation is offered by most of the major online brands and there are also a lot of small specialised shops having some sort of affiliate program. The programs are free with few exceptions, and there is no minimum limit of revenue to stay on the program. So the small revenues are balanced with very limited risks.

But affiliation is not by any means small business opportunity. Especially if you can tune your website to feed enough customers to the retailer, you will get a fair share of money, too. The trick is just to make this happen.

A good affiliate site adds some value to the sellable items, such as reviews, or provides those items that the visitors are interested in. If you just mimic the retailer with your affiliate site, you will not get too much sales. Why customers should select your site instead of the retailer’s?

The best results require hard work: you have to gather an audience that checks your site from time to time, has similar interests and is willing to buy something online. And of course, somebody has to cater for those interests. First select items that can be easily purchased through web and are easy to display, such as books, CDs, DVDs or posters. After you have gained some experience with running an affiliates shop, wider the range with something especially interesting to your visitors.

Details

The details of affiliation differ from retailer to retailer. The technical issues are easily solved as the affiliation is designed to be easy to lure widest possible audience. Usually the legal details fill five to ten sheets of paper, and you really should read them through carefully. There can be catches that can make you lost your revenues for the last quarter or fiscal year — if you are not playing by the rules. There can be also regulations for advertising, publicity, and content of your site. Spamming is forbidden in every affiliation agreement that I have seen so far.

The usual way to create an affiliate shop is to create links to the desired items using the tools provided by the retailer and then copy these links into your site code. This may prevent you to show the exact price of the item as it can vary daily.

Some affiliate programs provide technically advanced alternatives for copying and pasting HTML fragments. Amazon.com, for example, has created an XML interface for fetching information about items. You can transform that information to be part of your site and have a site that is always up-to-date.

< Creating a Store | Web Business Guide | Online Advertising >