Questions from a potential merchant

[JLawson]

Hi everyone,

I recently looked into starting up a few niche affiliate marketing sites of my own to make some extra cash and mentioned the idea to my Uncle who runs a pharmaceutical/beauty products business. We got to talking about some of the things he is currently selling and I asked whether he sold them online. He mentioned that he does, but that his online sales are very small. I figured it would be a great idea for him to look into putting his product on an affiliate site such as LinkShare, ShareaSale or CJ as a merchant and get maybe some sales that way. He seemed pretty open to the idea and wanted me to look into it for him and get it set up.

I've lurked through this site for quite some time and you guys have given me some great ideas for my own affiliate sites, and I thought this would be a great place to ask a couple of questions if I was looking to become a merchant. I've ready through a lot of the articles in this section and have already learned quite a few great tips. I thought you could just sign up to an affiliate site, post your product and the sales would start coming in. But after reading through some posts here, I realize that there is a lot more to it!

The first product we want to try out is a facial cream. My uncle is a real straight shooter and I know that he wouldn't BS me about anything. He legitimately was very excited about this product. He said it actually really does work to make skin look younger. It doesn't really mention this on the website, but he said it also works really well to fight acne. I don't know if having a product that actually works matters from an affiliate marketing point of view, but it certainly can't hurt.

I don't want to just jump into this whole affiliate thing right away before I make sure that our site is set up to get decent conversion rates. I realize this will take some testing and tweaking to get perfect, but I figured you guys would be able to tell me if there is any glaring problems that we should fix.

So I was hoping to get some feedback from you guys on what you guys thought of the site. Do you think that it will convert okay right now in its present state, or do you think we should be making some changes to it? I'm just kind of getting started in all of this and I'm not too sure what is good for conversion rates and what isn't.

I was also wondering what affiliate site everyone here would recommend that we use? Which one do you guys prefer to use, and which one do you think has the most users and would give us the best results?

Another thing that I was kind of worried about is that the site has a .ca domain and the prices are shown in CDN dollars. Obviously we would like to go after the US market since the customer base is so huge, and I was wondering if these two things might hurt our sales.

I'm sure I'll have some more questions down the road, but if anyone has any other ideas or any tips it would be much appreciated.

Thank you,
Jake

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Jake,

Welcome to 5 Star. Thanks for joining us.

Sorry I am totally buried today so no time to give you feedback right this second. However one of our Mods is an affiliate manager and I think can give you some good feedback when he has time. I'll try to weigh in if I get a chance later too.

 

[Laura61]

Hi JLawson, welcome! I don't have answers for you but wanted to welcome you to the forum.

 

[JLawson]

Thanks for the welcome. I'm kind of new to this whole thing and this place has been really great so far in helping to show me the ropes. I've spent hours reading various threads and have only scratched the surface!

 

[Ron Bechdolt]

Jake,

I think you could use this in the affiliate market, but I really suggest you have more than one product. Affiliates may not want to promote just one product. Providing links and banners to various products may help attract affiliates and may increase sales.

The Canadian URL may hurt you both in affiliates and in customers. I'd suggest you have a duplicate site for the US marketplace. Both might be able to share the same shopping cart.

Hope this gives you a starting point. Ask away if you have more questions.

 

[JLawson]

Thanks for the feedback Ron! I thought the .ca domain might hurt us a bit too. We do own the .com domain and it shouldn't be an issue to create a mirror under that domain.

Unfortunately we only have the one product at this time. I'm hoping once we get the website fixed up a bit that it will be good enough for affiliates to want to promote it.

As I mentioned in my original post, this is a very high quality product and we are expecting a large number of sales from repeat buyers. Is there a way to track repeat sales though so the affiliate gets credit? Say a user comes from an affiliate link, but then visits our site directly to buy it a few months later, will the affiliate get credit for that sale? I'm assuming the user would have a cookie from their original visit and the affiliate would still get the credit for the repeat purchase. Is this correct?