Contact The Manufacturer

by Brian on April 6, 2010

Affiliate sites are great because they are typically hands off.

Someone sees a product, they click through and buy it… You get paid.

On the other hand, there’s a lot more money in actually distributing a product.

Distributing a product online isn’t much different than promoting it as an affiliate product…

The difference is the actual processing of the order…

For example, with an Amazon product… The buyer will click through and purchase the product… Amazon takes care of processing the payment and shipping the product arrives to the buyer’s address.

If there’s a problem, Amazon takes care of it… A lot of the time they refer you directly to the manufacturer, but they are still the buffer, at least at the beginning.

If you’re distributing a product, you need to make sure you have payment processing in place… and typically you’ll have to place the order with the manufacturer.

So if you’re advertising a product on Amazon… Go find the product’s manufacturer.

There are 2 prices:

Wholesale – That’s the price you pay for the product.

Retail – That’s what you sell your product for.

You keep the difference between Wholesale and Retail as your profit.

Things to consider when dealing with a manufacturer.

Does the manufacturer drop ship?

If the manufacturer doesn’t drop ship, it can be a huge pain in the ass to deal with. The reason is that you have to receive the product, then you have to ship it out… Which is very time consuming and adds to your cost.

Drop shipping is when you order the product from the manufacturer on your client’s behalf, you pay the manufacturer and they send the product to your customer on your behalf. It’s totally the way to go.

Is it worth it?

If your profit would be $15 if you sell the product as an affiliate, but your profit would be $20 if you had it drop shipped from the manufacturer… Is it really worth it to deal with drop shipping (and payment processing) for that extra $5?

If you’re selling 100 units a day, absolutely it’s worth it to process the orders… I’d probably hire someone to process the orders for me.

If it takes you 10 minutes to process an order and you are only selling 4-5 units a day, it may not be worth the extra $20-25 you are earning as a distributor to process the orders. Especially because if you’re a distributor you have to deal with all initial customer service, which could amount to a lot of extra hours in the day.

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