Go60Guy - 11:19 pm on Aug 10, 2002 (gmt 0)

Dogboy - glad to see you've relaxed a little. I've operated as an affiliate for the most part for some time now with very satisfactory results. My revenue stream continues to grow, and, frankly, I'm having fun doing it. I do take a little umbrage at your reference to "affiliate crap". Lets just say, some sites are crap, affiliate or not. I don't want to belabor this.

I've run much higher profile businesses - been there done that - and I'm not into empire building anymore. What I like about being an affiliate is that I have almost no customer relations problems and no employees or payroll. I don't have to hire website developers since I know HTML and am free to experiment and do SEO as I wish.

That said, I've always been open to the idea of becoming a reseller, or something along those lines. I'm not yet very schooled in this, but have wondered if it might open up customer relations nightmares, a need to handle returns and other hassles not present with being an affiliate. Do you need a credit facility with suppliers?

Also, when you reach a certain point as an affiliate, you can negotiate higher commissions with merchants. Not only that, there are certain areas where I'm getting affiliate commissions between 25 to 30% anyway.

If I thought there were convincing advantages to using a different business model along the lines you suggest, I might be willing to take the plunge.

Could you and others with experience here elaborate further?