Hi. I'm back.

[grnidone]

I took a break and am now hitting it hard.

Just wanted to say Hello.

[JasonD]

WB

Is seed harvesting season over already?

[littleman]

Hey! 

[Brad]

Welcome back!

[Rupert]

Good to see you about again

[grnidone]

I've decided to do *an* affiliate site.  Right now, I'm hitting it hard getting new clients for my copywriting business, but I'd like to get some income from affiliate work. 

The thing that has *always* stopped me in the past -- and I've always felt too stupid to ask this is -- how do you tweak a cart to do items from different affiliates?

So...let's say a customer puts into their cart:

item A (from Widgets are Us Affiliate)
Item B (from Gadgets are Us Affiliate)
Item C (from Littleman's Affiliate site)

How do you make the cart a seamless process for the consumer?

[littleman]

Not a silly question, but basically you don't.  If it is affiliate you usually pop off the visitor to the merchant's site for the order processing.  You may want to look at doing a dropship business, it has lots of advantages over going affiliate if you want to sell items.

[Drastic]

Good to see you back...I'm pm you about a possible quick writing job.

[JasonD]

> How do you make the cart a seamless process for the consumer?

It's possible but only if the merchants enable it. Normally it's online marketplaces such as Ebay, Amazon, Alibabi etc you can do it.

There are some workarounds but..... they're black hatish at best.

[grnidone]

I've always felt that sending someone off to the "real" site to process the order was a dead give-away for an affiliate site and would result in a google bomb. 

If I'm going to do affiliate, I want to do it well.  I want the consumer to have a great experience and come back to get whatever it is I am selling.  I can't do the "throw 10,000 sites at the wall and see what sticks" because it just ain't me.

There simply must be a way to do it and I figured if anyone knew how, you guys would know it.

[Rumbas]

Welcome back!

I agree with the others here, it's extremely difficult to do - however some cash back sites kind of do this. Or at least they try to make a relationship directly with the customer as they split their commissions with them.

Some other sites are basically a store with all the bells and whistles however the add to cart button sends the customer to the merchant and bundling different products from different merchants across different networks are extremely difficult imo. Can't see how that's going to work - especially the payment etc.

[Rupert]

The only way to do it I think is to be the merchant, not the affiliate.  If you are taking the money, then you take responsibility for the product, and have to have legal ownership of it (in the UK thats how it works anyway). 

There is no reason you cannot do that, and then feed the real Merchant the order through a back end system. Its the same mechanism as drop shipping really.

[Mackin USA]

Good to know you are back.
Can't SEE YOU but do remember those GREEN eyes

[Drastic]

What you are talking about is drop shipping, not affiliate. You sell, merchant ships. You deal with customer service, etc.

That's the only way to take the money and keep them on your site through the whole experience. Bear in mind the drop shipper will likely put marketing materials inside the box, unless you get white label drop ship suppliers.

[ergophobe]

Welcome back!

The only examples that come to mind are giants - the travel sites for example. It's not my job, but I am peripherally involved in dealing with Expedia, Booking.com and sites like that. Expedia is basically an affiliate for hotels and airlines, but they own the customer. At least on the hotel end, if a customer wants to change a reservation, that's Expedia that does it because the hotel doesn't have the customer info (credit card, etc). All the hotel has is notification of a reservation. It's a hugely complex system with face to face negotiations on commissions, price parity, last room availability and other details. And at the end of the day, Expedia is on the hook for customer service, reservation changes, dispute resolution and more.

And by the way, even there, there are two models.
- Expedia takes the reservation and passes the money to the hotel which cuts them a monthly affiliate check
- Booking.com takes their commission off the top and sends only the rest to the hotel
- Trip Advisor Instant Booking sends all the customer info through by connecting to the hotel's booking engine and the hotel owns the customer and Trip Advisor has nothing to do with them after the booking other than get the commission check (so that's closest to a classic affiliate deal)