Forum Moderators: skibum
What I need now is financial data on the affiliate industry in the US and Europe - things like gross sales via affiliate networks, percentage of all e-commerce transactions done via them etc. Case studies of e-commerce companies increasing their sales with affiliate networks would also be helpful.
Having this data will enable me to make solid financial projections in the business plan (I intend to attract investors' money for this) as well as be more effective selling local merchants on the service.
Any idea where this kind of information can be obtained? Any other practical advice on starting a network is also greatly appreciated.
You may want to approach this by sector. For example the financial categories (i.e. credit cards, loans, etc) may be more developed and ready for the affiliate world than e-retailing. Things such has having a distribution infrastructure (shipping/delivery) and univerally held payment mechninisms (such as consumer credit cards) may be sparse in a particular country.
I have some intersting research for you, but I'll need your email since I dont know how to do attachements through webmaster world email. You can private message me your email if you want.
Good luck
You are right about distribution infrastructure and payment systems. These are still sparse here, but I feel we are at a beginning of an exponential growth.
Loans and financial services have only recently started to pick up, and there is now a huge boom in this market despite high interest rates. However, this sector is mostly offline at this point.
Still, approaching by sector is a good point. My plan is to work with only one merchant first - develop the system and gain first publishers, then copy the solution within the sector with later expansion to others. I actually picked up this idea a while ago in this thread [webmasterworld.com] here.
