eCommerce Experiment
Earlier this year, I decided to set up a couple of eCommerce websites, acting purely as an affiliate partner with Amazon.
My intention with the websites, was to write a post about how successful (or not) the websites would be, using limited resources. The websites sold baby products and clothing.
There were certain restrictions on what I could do, such as;
- All the plugins I was to use had to be FREE through the WordPress repository
- The themes I used had to be FREE through the WordPress repository
- Setup could not take more than 6 hours per website
I deliberately broke Amazons T&C’s. I won’t get into their terms here though.
The clothing shops made no money, and did not even rank after doing a small amount of meta/seo work.
The baby shop earned just under USD$5000 in sales over a two week period – after being indexed only for a few days.
There were 17,000 baby products available (just prior to Amazon cancelling the affiliate). The products were automatically being added via a bot at a rate of about 10 an hour, and due to the website being constantly updated via this process, Google considered it an active site, content was relevant to the domain and meta tags, which boosted the SEO.
The point I was (trying) to prove, is that making an eCommerce site can be done, quickly without costing much.
How much would the site be making today if I hadn’t breached Amazons terms? I don’t know, but I assume it would be in excess of $20k per month in sales – not profit. As an affiliate partner, you would expect around 3-5%.
Just quickly, the reason I breached the terms, was due to the site being solely product based. I did not provide any blog posts, or review the products available. Amazons terms are rather strict, and from the sales I generated, I did not get paid due to the breach. That’s ok, it was only a test.
Using WordPress CAN make you a semi-passive income. I say semi-passive, because there are rules you need to abide by (such as Amazons). If you like writing reviews, or if your website is of a certain niche, register as an affiliate that is relevant to you. Why not make some $$$ from people clicking onto some links?
Do you have a question for me? Send me an email.
