Forum Moderators: buckworks
Has anyone considered putting an affiliate store or mall on there site and collect commisions on sales. Customers would be refered to sites that I think are compatible with mine although not competitive. I would actively promote this "mall" on my site with links and maybe even devote some space on my weekly newsletter.
What are some of the potential risks and rewards. Anyone have any experience with a program like this?
A lot of "affiliates" create fake sales and then the merchant pays out on those fake sales. A few weeks later, the merchant gets a chargeback on the sale, loses the money and possibly the product.
-Corey
If you mean that you'd have an affiliate program and take on other sites as your affiliates, then, nope, haven't tried that.
(Amazon integration is very cool ... )
Actually, the bit of experience I was going to share is that I make very few of my sales through the mall (although I have to say the four largest individual purchases have been from there--evidently Christmas gifts, judging by the timing). The majority of sales are through links to related items on the content pages, and links I put up to newly available items on my "What's New" page, where I also post links to new content on the site. The latter is the "hottest" page for sales, if an item takes off.
In fact, I've come to see the mall section of the site as more of a service to visitors than a source of income. The niche the site covers is one I know very well, while larger/broader sites get so confused about it that a search for related items at, say, Amazon, is often difficult and fruitless. So I make "hunting trips" to find what's available at several larger sites where I've joined the affiliate programs and then I organize it into "stores" in my "mall" depending on the type of item. This takes a lot of time, and if my only aim for the site was making money it wouldn't be worth doing it. But I've been involved in the niche for over 30 years and don't mind spending some time helping newer people find what they need.
---Probably the biggest monetary reward is that it's on those "hunting trips" that I find the newly available and hard-to-locate items that people snap up on the "What's New" page. ;-) After that's run its course, the items get moved to the mall, so the selection there stays as comprehensive as possible.
One of the cardinal rules of affiliate marketing is that you need to give the customer some kind of "added value" - that is, some reason to buy the product through your site instead of going directly to the one where it's sold. That's why such things as banner ads are notoriously poor performers in affiliate marketing. If all you're planning to do is put up a link to the other site, IMVHO it'd have the same [bad] conversion rate as a banner ad, or even a worse one, because it would be smaller. My guess is that it would end up the same as my mall - a service to your visitors, if you want to give it, but not much of a money-maker. And I don't have to worry about competing with my own products!
