The Affiliate Marketer’s Journal

More and more I am seeing the trend of merchants offering “private label” or “template” web sites. Private labels appear to be a full fledged e-commerce site, complete with product pages, shipping policies, etc. When customers opt to buy something from the template site, however, they are actually directed to a shopping cart on the merchant’s site. Most of the time the customer is totally unaware that they are actually buying from the merchant’s site instead of the private label site that they had been browsing. Template sites have several advantages as well as a few disadvantages which I’ll quickly go over.

The first advantage is customer retention. Since they spend their time at the template site they they’ll think they are actually ordering from you. Repeat orders are much more common as you effectively own the customer and have a cookie of infinite duration. In contrast, when using simple affiliate marketing it is much more difficult to get the customer to return to the affiliate site compared to the merchant site the customer was sent to. As well, most private labels often allow you to set the prices for products, letting you set your own commission rate and undercut the competition. Finally, since template sites give you static HTML product pages on your server, you can fully optimize them to rank highly on the search engines. This is essential since there will be template sites with the same content and Google’s duplicate content filter will rank unchanged template sites very poorly. An example this can be seen by searching Google for “And, our state-of-the-art vacuum sealing” (an excerpt from a page supplied with a PriorityClick template site).

There is one major disadvantage to template sites: the legal implications. When using typical affiliate marketing the customer is fully aware that they are ordering from a given company, and if they have any problems or complaints they will deal with the merchant and not you (at least the vast majority of the time). However as private labels hide the merchant from the equation, customers may come after you to deal with problems, refunds, etc. Indeed you may even be liable for damages caused the product. A good legal disclaimer should be present on template sites to protect you.

To get started with template sites, here are a few companies who offer them for free to their affiliates:

• PriorityClick - Offers sites for both printer ink and diabetic supplies.
• AllZines - Free private label site for selling magazine subscriptions.
• X10.com - Template site for security & home automation products.

Have you used a private label affiliate marketing site before? If so then please leave a comment below with more details on your experience.