Domain Reseller Vs Domain Affiliate
I'm in the process of building a small-ish website that offers a few domain related services and today I've been researching domain affiliate and reseller services.
As far as I can tell, all reseller services ask their resellers to keep their accounts topped up with money for their customers to buy domains with and then the reseller gets the profits between their prices and the service providers prices. I can see this model working but it must be a pain in the butt having to keep topping up your account to cover any customer spends. Also, the more money you top-up with, the cheaper you get the domains and other products for. For some reseller accounts they want as much as $5000 in credits in order to qualify for their best domain prices.
The only real exception I found to this rule was GoDaddy who offer a paid reseller service that doesn't require constant topping-up with money. GoDaddy charge a one-time yearly setup fee and thats all you have to pay because all reseller sales go through the GoDaddy payment processor and the reseller just receives the profits. Plus, a reseller can set any prices they want. The only real downside to this reseller offer is their storefronts look just like the godaddy website and customers would spot this a mile off so I'd have to go for their API option which would require a lot of work.
So you see, theres a lot of downsides to being a domain reseller. These downsides are mainly costs and workload so I'm starting to think, maybe I'll just be much better off sticking to plain old affiliate links. Being a domain affiliate averages between 10 and 20% commission per sale and in some cases even goes upto 50% after your commissions have reached a target. Unfortunately, most domain affiliates only give commissions out to first-time customer referrals but some do give commissions based on where that customer has just come from.
With the ease of being an affiliate I'm starting to think this is a much better option for me as it requires no initial financial commitment and virtually zero work.
Whats your thoughts on this?
Does anyone know any domain affiliate or reseller services you'd like to recommend?
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libertysoul -
Thanks
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Steve Sieverding -
Thanks
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