Selling Affilliate Products - OK or Not

[Guest Bunster147]

I have been using cube cart software to sell health products for a number of years now and I am very happy with the software and all of the add-ons I have purchased (thanks to Estelle).

But in today’s climate, I am finding increasingly difficult to (financially) to have the multitude of products that I recommend in stock.

As markets change, it becomes difficult for me to pre-empt what clients require and I frequently find myself having to order products in as clients request them, which is becoming unacceptable due to the amount of time and effort required to accept the order, order the products on clients behalf and then delivery the products.

In the past I have always held products in stock, which allows me to guarantee delivery of these products the following day but with the increase in the number of products clients are interested in, it is becoming increasing difficult to satisfy client requests efficiently.

One alternative to this problem is to allow client to purchase recommended products directly from an affiliate and it if for this reason that I am asking if the selling affiliate products using cube cart software is something I should be looking at or whether this is against cube cart policies.

I can of course develop my own purchase pages for each of these recommended products but I would love to be able to do it using Cube cart as the software give me so much more than a bog standard purchase page.

Thanking you in advance.

[Guest]

The problem with selling affiliate products is you will never make a lot of profit on them. Affiliate programs give you usually only 2-3% of the sale (rare ones give 5-10%), so can you really make enough money doing that?

I state a 5-10 day delivery time on my sites as I inventory very little ordering items as I get orders in and haven't had many complaints. I do occasionally have to turn down a rush order, but a lot of vendors will work with me overnighting items when I need them that quickly.

You might try this and see if it works for you. You might be surprised that customers don't have as much of a problem with it as you think.

[Guest Bunster147]

The problem with selling affiliate products is you will never make a lot of profit on them. Affiliate programs give you usually only 2-3% of the sale (rare ones give 5-10%), so can you really make enough money doing that?

I state a 5-10 day delivery time on my sites as I inventory very little ordering items as I get orders in and haven't had many complaints. I do occasionally have to turn down a rush order, but a lot of vendors will work with me overnighting items when I need them that quickly.

You might try this and see if it works for you. You might be surprised that customers don't have as much of a problem with it as you think.

Hi Mysty, Thanks for your post.

I have considered extended delivery dates for products that I do not hold in stock and that is one posibility that I am considering in addition to selling affiliated products.

At the moment, I am just looking at the various options that are out there and I think I will end up with a mixture of the two and I would like to have a single site/store that can cater for both.

I also have access to a number of EBooks, which I know can be sold using cube cart and so I am just looking to consolidate the whole lot with cubecart.

Thanks again for your post.

[Guest]

Why not try to find a reputable dropshipper for your type of products instead of an affiliate? Then you can take orders for them as normal from your store, just put thru the dropship order when someone orders that item? I have a mix of dropshippable and "regular" items in my stores and this works very well. It's best if you can find a wholesale only company that dropships - if they also sell retail, do some blind test shipments to friends and make sure no catalogs or other material with their retail store name is included in the shipment or arrive after the sale.