Selling products direct from site

[Trav]

My company is a retailer, but we currently do not offer our products directly from our site. Instead, we have an arrangement with a third party which maintains it's own site where our products are sold. I'm a little foggy on why, but it's an arrangement that's been in place since long before my time.

In the course of planning our forthcoming site redesign, it's been suggested that we move to a model of selling directly from our site. I've done some limited research of comparable companies in the same space, and from what I've seen, most of them maintain separate sites for active selling, or simply link to the retailers that carry their products.

I'm wondering if others here have confronted this question, and what ideas, concerns or issues they uncovered in making a decision. Let me know if there's some additional detail which would be of use- trying to keep this general.

[dpd1]

If a manufacturer is already established with retailers, I could see companies hiding their direct sales in a second site, just to keep the retailers off their backs. I don't know why a retailer would pay to have a whole other party sell items through a separate site though. Kind of sounds like something somebody would do in the beginning, if they didn't really understand how the internet works. I can't think of a logical reason to do that, but maybe somebody else can.

[piatkow]

I don't know why a retailer would pay to have a whole other party sell items through a separate site though.

Basically outsourcing the logistics and presumably also risks such a card fraud.
If you have an existing mail order operation then plugging in orders from a web site should be pretty easy. Setting up a whole new department, finding space for the packing ad despatch process, making agreements with a carrier, increased accounts overhead dealing with chargebacks and fraud, are all organisational overheads that you will need to justify.

[Trav]

Great, thanks for the replies. That's kind of the same line of thought I've had, but I wanted to see if there was some aspect of this that I'm not understanding.

[piatkow]

I used to work for a widget supplier who did consumer mail order to enthusiasts as well as mainstream wholesale supply. When we started building our web presence(this was 15 years ago)we passed the whole one-off order area to a third party who simply purchased from us in bulk. Result - we saved far more in admin than we lost in direct sales.