I work as part of a production crew for an audio publishing company. Our company sells our product to distributors who in turn sell it to Amazon.com and various other internet stores. Amazon offers an affiliate program to sell any of their products on personal websites. Would I be breaking any laws If I were to create a review website of only my companies products and in-turn sell them to the public through affiliate marketing on amazon? Technically I would be competing against their established website for sales, but at the end of the day my company still wins because they are the ones moving product out. But would me being an employee here have any legal aspect which could stop me from doing this? Also, would I be able to put the companies name in the URL? The reason i am asking these questions is because I recently have taken interest in affiliate marketing. The smaller the competition the better. With a small company on its way up, this could possibly be a gold mine in a few years. I do not work for the company who sells through Amazon.com. We only do the production and then ship the product to a distributor who then sends it to Amazon.com. So If I do not claim to be a part of this company and make it well known that my site has no affiliation and that we are merely a review site for the product it produces. Would I be able to be an Amazon.com affiliate and post links after the reviews to buy the material directly from amazon.com?
i would definitely consult someone at your work for that. They might be happy as you would bring more exposure to their products (without them needing to pay extra for advertising) and then yes, they are then still making money from selling the actual products. I think the whole thing comes down to your workplace, even if it is legal, if they dont approve of you doing it, then you might be risking your relationship with them. There are other ways to do affiliate sales without creating a conflict of interest. For example, a hostgator affiliate takes $50 usd per sale, no mucking around or anything, its a set and forget type system, and you can set up affilate sales for virtually anything these days.