E-Commerce and Affiliates

[Cza102282]

We currently have an e-commerce store that has over 1300 promotional products. What my boss would like to do is be able to offer a package where an affiliate would be able to have their own personalized store that would display all of the products from our current store. It also is essential that when an affiliate has an end user buy from their 'section' that a percentage of the funds are transferred to both their account and ours as well.

Looking into a solution I was told there are was to do this by strictly coding. Not being really sure of how to tackle that, I was wondering if they are any hosts out there that accommodate this easily? Are there any articles, tutorials, demos that someone could point me to?

[buckworks]

Think very, very carefully about this. Creating duplicate or near-duplicate "personalized stores" is certain to create SEO difficulties for everyone involved if you get too many of them.

It might be productive if you have affiliates with the ability to drive traffic in ways that don't depend on the search engines, but as far as the search engines are concerned you'd risk ending up with a bunch of sites whose pages get dismissed as duplicate content, produce few sales and make it harder for the "mother site" to rank.

As an affiliate I've been there, done that (trying to promote a "personalized site" provided by the merchant) and it was not nearly as productive as creating unique content.

[lorax]

I was thinking the same thing buckworks. But if the audiences are there it could work out well - if played the right way.

[Cza102282]

This is definitely a perspective I never took into consideration. I will bring this up and see what everyone else thinks.

[Cza102282]

So if I understand correctly, I could make this work and not screw up the SEO if I build an entirely unique site but still read from the same data store?

Are there any other options?