White label comparision site advice

[crazihos]

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Hi folks,

I'm having a new comparison site developed (finance related) and am trying to work out how best to develop white labels of it.

I'm looking for advice on how best to pay affiliates who may wish to promote the sites.

Would a backend system where you populate the site with your own affiliate links be best (then your white label shows our affiliate links 20% of the time and yours 80%). Plus points are its all done through 3rd party tracking which allows you to keep track of your stats via your normal network relationships. - minus points - you have to manage the links (we would help with this with email alerts etc..)

Or would you prefer an exit click payment where we pay you for every click to a merchants site like kelkoo, pricerunner etc..we would set up a backend tracking system to manage this (I know this is how moneysupermarket used to work it).

The alternative is that we become a network in our own right and track sales which at this early stage is something I am looking to avoid although it is something I will look at.

Its all a bit confusing - being a merchants one thing but being a merchant selling other peoples products through other people to other people not easy!lol

Any advice from interested partys would be very welcome.

Cheers

Russ

[lowndsy]

Rich is the man to speak to - he's got something similar with his mobile phone service.

[pricethat]

The alternative is that we become a network in our own right and track sales which at this early stage is something I am looking to avoid although it is something I will look at.

Its all a bit confusing - being a merchants one thing but being a merchant selling other peoples products through other people to other people not easy!lol

I do not think that is an alternative, you will violate most networks terms and conditions by doing this and operating your own network via links from another network unless you have exclusive permission, CJ for one do not like it at all.

What you would be best doing is to just have a very simple login page for your affiliates and ask them to put their affiliate id for each network in the field provided, then all you have to do on redirect is do a find and replace substituting your own id for theirs 80% of the time or whatever you set it to. It is like the easiest programming in the world to do.

The only thing is you will need to list all the merchants you have on networks and probably links directly to the signup page to make sure affiliates are signed up to each program you have.

One thing i would do in this case is the following, when a user clicks to visit the merchant i would present them with a page that says we are redirecting you to the merchants page, please wait. While that was happening i would use wget to check that the redirect url is working (because if an affiliate id is not valid then it will not redirect). If the link is correct and working then i would list that as a valid affliate id next to that merchant so i know i do not have to check it again. (most affiliates once signed up generally do not get kicked off).

Now that might sound a lot but you are talking less than a second to use wget, if it fails then you can redirect people using your own affiliate id instead of waisting a customer and then you can email the affiliate to say that you tried to pass a customer to the merchants site using the id of xxxxxxx, the redirect url returned an error 404 or whatever, please update your affiliate id or sign up for this merchants program.

Now i am out of breath, hard work typing.....

[crazihos]

Cheers guys,

I do not think that is an alternative, you will violate most networks terms and conditions by doing this and operating your own network via links from another network unless you have exclusive permission, CJ for one do not like it at all.

Pricethat - by that I mean for us to go to all the merchants and get our own direct accounts with them so that we can set up our own indy network rather than use aff links via other networks. This would be a good long term goal to have when the numbers are up but initially I like Rich's mobile phone idea (80/20 split) as it gives affiliates the trust that would be lacking in an indy program with an unknown merchant.

I'll be passing on your post to my developers though as it makes a lot of sense from what I understand of it - i'm sure they'll have more idea on wget than I do.

So you think the 80/20 ideas better than exit clicks then - I remember reading a google marketing mag they sent me which talked about how much more valuable an exit click is from a comparison site, however to establish an effective payment structure would take huge amounts of testing and we would also be left open to click fraud - I bet the 34000 strong click fraud network would apply for a site each and destroy our budgets over a weekend!

Any more ideas would be great guys

Cheers

Russ

[CompareStore]

Using your 80/20 affiliate id split is the easiest solution. It's something we are looking into for The W3 Alliance.

It also gives you the opportunity to incentivise your affiliates by offering them a higher percentage if they hit certain thresholds.

The main benefit is that you do not have to worry about invoicing and other admin nightmares!