Hi-

I am looking for a REPUTABLE company with PROVEN success that will
allow the reselling of its products. Basically, I want to be able to
sell their products through my Web site and earn a HEFTY percentage of
the sales. Obviously, there is Amazon.com and the like, but they only
give, what, like 5-15% tops?

I don't want to have to deal with the shipping, billing, merchant
accts, etc., my sole job needs to be to market my site and get people
to buy through my site, but this company will take care of the rest.
Preferably they will give me a template to upload with my own company
name or otherwise it would allow me to link directly to their site and
track the sales through an ID.

I will accept a company that sells you a product really cheap and then
you can sell it at a large margin, as long as it meets the above
criteria that all I have to do is get people to my site and they do
the rest.

Furthermore, and this is *IMPORTANT*, I am not just looking for any
products (i.e. things that are unlikely to sell well). I am looking to
be able to sell things that are hot at the moment, so acceptable
companies will likely carry a very wide array of products and top
brands, everything from electronics to clothing.

Wouldn't it be nice to just be able to link to shopping.yahoo.com and
make 50% on referals? Hey, maybe it's possible and I just haven't
looked.

Thank you much!

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Request for Question Clarification by xemion-ga on 15 Jun 2002 09:35 PDT

What is the least amount of commission rate you will accept?  How much
traffic does your website recieve? 

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Clarification of Question by tododetodo-ga on 15 Jun 2002 14:26 PDT

My site currently receives about 1000 hits a day. As for the
percentage, I would say 40% sounds resonable, whther it be a strict
40% of the sale or also, as I said before, a 40%+ margin where they
sell me something cheap and I can resell it at at least 40% margin and
still be below suggested retail price.

Furrthermore, I should clarify a high-rated answer will also include
USEFUL and MEANINGUL links to where I can find statistics of the
current hottest selling products.

Dear tododetodo,

You've gotten some good advice from people about affiliate programs.
And they are the way to go. 

You may need to do a little reading to find the ones that pay 40% or
more.
But don't limit yourself to that number. As drjon-ga suggested "Maybe
find companies/products you wish to sell, and see if the websites have
affiliate program offerings."

Yes, the casino programs do pay well. And I know several people who
earn
6 figures a year. However, I am doing research into the legal and tax
issues
of this area. My concern is whether the government will decide online
gambling is illegal and want to make a test case of an affiliate. 
Incidentally, stay away from SportsBooks sites' affiliate programs.
There is
legal precedent that those are illegal. 

On the other hand, whoever said that that companies cannot afford to 
pay 40% is only half write. Companies with tangible products and hard
costs cannot. But companies with software, e-books and soft cost can
pay 40% or more and often do. 


Here are a couple of places to look for programs. The webmasters of
these sites get feedback from affiliates, the programs are rated, and
they are removed if anyone reports they are not getting paid:

Allan Gardyne's Associate Programs.com
http://www.associateprograms.com/index.shtml

Neil Durrant's Affilate Marketing
http://www.affiliatemarketing.co.uk/

An organization you should join (free) to be able to
communicate with the top people in the Affiliate Marketing
field and get feedback from them about the best, and most
properly paying programs:

Herby Olschewski's
http://iAfma.org 
This is fast becoming one of the strongest affiliations
of affinity marketers.

Now, you didn't tell us what subjects your website covers.

But some programs that I know about that are reputable and pay me
properly and have high percentage payouts are:

Kevin Wilke's Sites pay 40% or 50% 
and if you do volume, you can ask him to 
set up second tier commissions so you can 
get paid for referring sites (he won't do this
unless you ask.)
http://www.mlmtaxhelper.com
http://internettaxhelper.com/

Mark Joyner's ROIbot pays 20%, but also pays 5%
on sites you refer to them
http://www.roibot.com/
(Note, do keep an eye on their accounting.
They will pay you, but you'll have to make
sure they get it right.)

Ken Evoy's SiteSell.com pays 25%-30% and 
commissions on sites you refer (I am not sure
how much).
http://sitesell.com

Kowanhuga pays 20% and 5% on all sites you refer
http://www.myaffiliateprogram.com/join.asp


Places you will find affiliate programs you can trust.
Many of them carry companies with major brand names,
like the Wall Street Journal, American Express, Hallmark, etc.
(also some of the infomercial folks):


Commission Junction
http://cj.com
They will let you search by commission types and rates

BeFree
http://reporting.net
They rate their merchants, so you can see how well they pay.

LinkShare
http://linkshare.com
Searching on their site isn't the easiest.
So look at the overall categories.

A list of Kowabunga's members
http://www.affiliatecash.com/

This is just the beginning. There's soooo much more.

Doing a search in Google.com for  "affiliate programs"+40%
came back with over 80,000 hits.

When you find one you like, look it up in
Allan Gardyne's site and see how people have rated it. 

You will find sites that will restore your income and 
revitalize your site.

Best wishes,

TaxMama-ga

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Clarification of Answer by taxmama-ga on 13 Sep 2002 08:19 PDT

Incidentally, since I was just looking up some links for my
newsletter, here are some companies with high percentage payouts or
high fees:

http://www.enom.com                     40%
http://www.123Inkjets.com               36%
http://www.tel3.com                     $10.00 per sale - $1.50 per
lead
http://www.Proinkjets.com               35%
http://www.northamericanbancard.com     $75.00 per sale

Just a few things I happened to catch.

Best wishes
TaxMama-ga

Here is a listing of reseller info and advertising biz data.

http://www.bishart.com/webmasters

It sounds like an affiliate program is what you are looking for.  You
pitch the products and the offering company does the rest, sending you
a commission for pushing their product.  Maybe find companies/products
you wish to sell, and see if the websites have affiliate program
offerings.  Just an idea :-)

About the only places that will give you a 40% cut are online casinos
with affiliate programs.  We participate in some that pay up to 45% of
the players' net losses -- but even at that, they normally have other
deductions for fees and promotional costs.

I seriously doubt you're going to find anyone who will sell a
"hardgoods" product, handle the inventory costs, handle the
fulfillment costs, essentially everything, then give you 40% for
bringing them customers.  Very few products have that kind of margin
built in to them in the first place -- if they do, competition quickly
arrives to cut the margins back.

You probably need to be a little more realistic, and attempt to deal
with the problem by substantially increasing traffic to your site and
interest in whatever products you are selling.  Amazon is in a
position to pay virtually nothing because they are, quite simply, the
best in the business.  But look at their gross profit margin and
you'll see there is no room for a 30% or 40% payment.

The key to this process is to offer content on the site which attracts
many visitors, then when they get there, offer products that relate to
the items of interest.  For example, we own a website
http://www.videopokerreview.com.  At that site, you'll find a link to
our webstore, http://www.gamblersboutique.com.  The more traffice we
get to VPR, the more sales we have at gamblersboutique.com.

One other point.  Those companies (like Amazon) carrying a huge array
of products have huge inventory carrying costs.  As a result, it is
even less likely such a company is going to fork over a large chunk of
the gross margin just for a referral link to their site.

Good luck...

I'm going to start by stating that I have lots and lots of experience
with affiliate and reseller programs.  I've developed affiliate
websites with traffic from 50 to 200,000 unique IP's a day.  Secondly,
I can absolutely verify that there the program you're searching for
does not exist outside of casino programs.  The reason for this is
simple.  Merchants operate on a low profit margin.  Under 30% and
probably much much lower.  They cannot compete or make money if they
give a 40% referral fee to resellers.  The only businesses that will
offer this sort of program are casinos.  There are other programs with
40% referral fees, but these are internet-only services.  Domain
registration, for example.  I can also assure that if someone is
offering a 40% referral fee, they're probably being undersold
somewhere else.  Customers always go to the lowest price.  You have to
attempt to find a balance between a competitive price and a reseller
percentage.  While you may make 40% of $100, the customers will buy
the product from the website selling it for $60.
I'll be honest with you on another factor as well, 1,000 hits a day is
good, but not good enough to get you really high referral rates.  If
you have large (as in over 100,000 hits a day) traffic volume, you can
normally work custom deals with merchants for higher referrals rates.
To summarize, I'm sorry, but what you're looking for just doesn't
exist.

xemion-ga

You guys, thank you so much for all your feedback.

I am so sad that my traffic has lowered so much but I could safely say
at one point I was getting 20,000+ hits a day... and the CPC or
impressions were just not cutting it... then they would never send me
the checks or they would make up an excuse for which to disqualfy me
from the network. I recently applies at advertising.com, but they did
not accept me...

so basicallymy website has had no content for months and months and
months and like i said is now like at 5% of the traffic it used to
have and I want to figure out if there is any possible way I can still
profit from the traffic it still has

originally it was a URL redirect service for people who had long URL's
and wanted a free short URL, but like i said, i was making no money
off it, the click-thrus rate were horrible and i had to keep changing
hosts, god it was a mess, so just said forget it... and now i regret
it because 20,000 hits a day was a valuable asset that i have reduced
to 5% and im trying to figure out if there is anything i can do to
make a profit

i found spygear.com, they give you 50% for every piece you sell, but i
just don't trust companies anymore, i have had so many bad experiences
where i link up a company and they never pay me....


well thanks yáll