I dont know if this is possible. Are you able to take other peoples products and put them on your site and get a commission every time something is sold through your site? Is that part of affiliate marketing, i thought AM was just text and banner ads which directs people to the advertisers website? Was reading around, has something to do with the API key or something? Thanks
It really depends on what you're trying to sell. Each service/product provider you're looking to work with will likely have a different system if they even support this, which will create a mess for you. The typical and easiest way to do it is affiliate marketing as far as linking directly to the advertiser's site as you mentioned. If you went this route, you could make your own website and list all the products from various advertisers that you want to try to sell and make it look very much like a web store, then just have the products link to your affiliate link on the advertiser's site. However, I understand your desire to keep users on your site and this approach would not do that. As far as the API you mentioned, it's quite possible that some advertisers support this. For example, your customer places an order on your site for Product A for $50.00. Product A at Advertiser A costs you $40.00, so immediately after the customer places the order, your system uses the advertiser's API to automatically send the customer's order to the advertiser, the advertiser bills you, then the advertiser ships the product to the customer. This way, the customer stays on your site, you get to set your own prices, and the advertiser handles order fulfillment on the backend. However, finding advertisers that support this exact process may be quite difficult, and you have to program your site to accommodate each advertiser's API whenever you partner with a new company. What you're looking more for is general reselling of products and services. It is generally the same as the API process, except that it's manual rather than automated, meaning a customer would place an order, you would collect payment, then you would manually place an order with the advertiser to drop ship this product to the customer. Many companies have reseller/partner programs, so it's merely a matter of asking them to be a reseller.