Hey All, I've never actually tried affiliate programs and I am curious if you all think I am a good candidate for the concept. My wife owns a children's retail store and we have a lot of very loyal customers - we have about 1200 on our email list. A lot of our customers would like to buy things other than children's stuff in the store they want to support local businesses but you can only buy so many onsies. So here are my basic questions. 1. Is there any way for us to be sure that our customers aren't being scammed by the sellers? 2. Some of our customers don't have credit cards so could we collect the cash and buy the items on our credit cards and still get credit? A friend of mine told me that his affiliate wouldn't pay him if he bought the item himself. 3. Does using affiliate marketing in this manner make any sense at all? I hope these questions don't seem too idiotic. I am totally new to this so please be cool. Thanks all, Marty
1. Choose to work with only reputable sellers. You will need to do some background on them. But it's usually easy to tell who the scammers are. 2. If you're talking about e-commerce affiliates, you're mostly talking about on-line credit card payments. You might be able to get away with listing them as the buyer, and yourself as the billing party. But that can create mismatch problems. That's exactly what someone would do with a stolen card. 3. I think you might be better off going with some sort of reseller or drop-shipper program. That way you are still the one selling the product, and you deal directly with the manufacturer. You can also set your own rates. But of course this depends on exactly what types of products you are looking to sell.
Thank you so much for the awesome advice. I've been playing around with Amazon, but it doesn't seem like Amazon is what I am looking for. Can you please expand on how to find out more information about drop-shipper and reseller programs? Thank You
You are going to have a hard time finding somone willing to give you the information your looking for. Most keep it as a secret.
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