I have just completed my website and it has gone live. I have not completed the "order" page yet because I still have not applied for a merchant account to accept orders. My Question Is: What should I get first, a Merchant Account or set up my Affiliate Marketing Account? I plan on having the majority of my sales being through affiliate marketing. Would my merchant account need to have a special feature to track affiliate sales? or do affiliate programs have their own merchant accounts? If someone could fill me in with what I should do first I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you
Most affiliate programs like clickbank etc, have everything you need, you won't even be able to apply for a merchant account if your core business is affiliate marketing since the products sold are not yours as I understand.
not necessarily true -- i am affiliated with a merchant service provider that takes all affiliates -- mainly specializing in adult service related things such as phone chat, video chat etc e mail me if you want more info sandman0205@gmail
Thank you for the information guys. But must I apologize for being unclear. I have a product, that I created, that I am selling. I would like it to be sold through affiliate networks.
Thats different, if you have your own product / service you should apply for a merchant account once you have been able to grow your business, for a start I would still use something like PayPal, 2Co etc, and simply just have a Affiliate script running, depending how you set it all up it can be as easy as 1,2,3 to get started with it. You will need some form of automatic billing to attract affiliates, they want to the incomming orders and don't want to wait for you to receive money, manullay approve each order and so on, takes way to much time also for you, this has to be done on auto pilot. If it is a adult related business, CCBILL.COM has everything you are looking for, affiliate software, payment processing and all in 1 simple solution, they will even also pay your affiliates, sadly know one has made this for regular non Adult related business as far as I know.
Sorry but how will you tell the bank what you are going to sell, if you don't have any products or services but just promote someone elses product there is nothing and the bank won't open the account, maybe if you fool them it is possible sure, but it would not make any sense at all!
Thanks for the info fionix. The product that I'm selling is a male enhancement product. Would that fall under the adult category? From what I've seen, things in that category tend to have a higher % fee per transaction, is that your experience also?