E-franchise or Affiliate

I have been doing SEO for sometimes now and I got an e-commerce website that is making some money. I have a partner that knows nothing about search engines or internet marketing.

Heres what we're debating, is it better to run an affiliate program, where affiliates market links to our website with their affiliate tag?

Or is it better to sell e-franchises where we would manage a product database and allow people to sell our products in their own branded store?

I see SEO pros for affiliate, since the links point to my site. Also, the affiliates are people that have experience usually marketing links online.

I see echise as possibly watering down the SERPs with duplicate content, spreading backlinks out[watering down] and allowing others to create their own brand, mailing lists, social bookmarking, facebook pages and eventually possibly having the opportunity to replace us as a product/website provider with their own solution.

The benefit to echise is that we would charge a large lump sum in the beginning and maintenance fees to maintain their database [which we'd host]. We'd probably [imo] make more money selling echises than products.

The benefit to affiliate imo is that we'd have everything pointing at us, we'd be collecting all the data, we'd would make 0 upfront money and make the majority of our money by pushing product [and trade channels are important to me].



Can I get some experienced opinions here? To me it seems clear, but i would like some input from others with experience selling online/marketing