Network Selling: Make Payment Processing a Profit Center

Selling online normally takes one of two forms. Some firms act as retailers, selling others' goods either on a straight reseller basis, or as affiliates who receive a revenue share. The others sell their own wares and create the revenues they can with a limited inventory. Until recently, these have been the only models that have been easy to execute.

Enter the new concept of Network Selling. In this model, merchants sell their own goods alongside those of their partners. These merchants are now upgrading their online operations from acting as a virtual ‘factory outlet store' to being true e-businesses.

Why does this matter? It's about profitability. Next time you pass by an Apple Store, stop by to see the physical version of the phenomenon: sure, there are lots of goods that are actually manufactured by Apple, but there's an even greater supply (by volume if not shelf space) of after-market add-ons that Apple simply resells. The benefit for Apple is that they need simply provide shelf space and a mark-up; and when you're buying a $2,000 laptop, don't you pretty much always drop another hundred or so on accessories like an ergonomic keyboard or an external hard drive?

What Apple knows is that once a consumer has opened up their wallet, they are most open to being cross-sold high-margin items that fundamentally shift the profit margin of the transaction. Reselling somebody else's mouse pad required Apple to do no R&D, no manufacturing and limited marketing – they simply present the item for sale and collect a revenue share.

For online merchants selling their own wares, the twin challenges that limit growth are the size of each sale, and the size of the product catalog with which they can tempt the consumer. If you have just two products to sell, your revenue potential has a natural ceiling: once a consumer has bought both, you've nothing to tempt them with.

Network Selling allows you to break down the barriers between your, and others', product catalogs. Using this unique offering from Plimus (www.plimus.com), you can now cross-sell other merchants' goods. This means you can succeed in never having an order form that doesn't offer some kind of cross-sale; and because those cross-sales are created by a partner merchant, your revenue share goes straight to the bottom line.

Even better, once a firm commits to Network Selling, their customer list becomes a truly monetizable asset: once partnerships are in place to resell others' goods, the monthly newsletter to the customer base can include reasonable advertising to drive incremental sales – without the need for the merchant to invest in incremental R&D or manufacturing.

For more information, visit Plimus at www.plimus.com.