2 Duplicate E-commerce sites Risk vs Reward

[Rich_995]

Hi guys

I have a duplicate content question I was hoping someone might be able to give me some advice on?

I work for a small company in the UK and in our niche we have a huge product range and an excellent website providing the customer with a very good experience. We’re also backed up by a bespoke warehouse/logistic management system further enhancing the quality of our product. We get most traffic through PPC and are not one of the biggest brands in the industry and have to fight for marketshare.

Recently we were approached by another company in our industry that have built up a huge and engaged audience over decades but can’t logistically tap into their following to sell the products so they have suggested a partnership. They are huge fans of what we do and basically want a copy of our site to be rebranded and hosted on a subdomain of their website and we would then pay them a commission of all the sales the new site received. So 2 identical sites with different branding would exist.

Based on tests they have carried out we could potentially double our sales in weeks and the potential is huge so we are excited about the possibility.

But…..how would we handle the duplicate content, would we be penalised? Would just one of the sites be penalised? Or if sales increase as much as we think they might, would it be worth a penalty as our current rankings aren’t great?

Any advice would be great.

Cheers

Richard

[Rich_995]

Thats great advice, i'll be sure to put it to good use!

And thanks for the Yahoo analogy, i'll keep it in mind!

[CleverPhD]

Thanks Rich for the insight, it helps in understanding where you are coming from.  My only other point would be that if you do go through with this partnership, there should be some other way to build your brand with all the customers coming through the site you are going to build/maintain.   Your contract should make clear that you are allowed to have access to all customer data and can use it for marketing etc from your main product site (not the one you are managing).  Your partner should not only promote this new site, but your branded products and main site as well.   Leverage this situation to gain awareness of your product so that you can build organic traffic to your site.  Set your business plan so that at the end of the contract you have used this relationship to make your reach "huge".  Therefore, if at the end of the contract your revenue goes to zero from this project it does not matter.  Don't assume that your partner would never start their own e-commerce operation.  Once they watch you guys take the lion's share of the revenue, they can do the math really quick to realize that they can afford to build something, pay for it and make even more money.

There was once this massive web portal that ruled the internet called "Yahoo" way back in the last century.  Yahoo decided to let this little startup that was founded by a couple of goofy college kids to show branded web search results on the Yahoo website. As Yahoo was the biggest site on the internet at the time, lots of people learned about this really great little search engine called "Google" (you may have heard of it).  So many people liked the search results from Google that even after Yahoo stopped using Google for search results, it did not matter as the users were already going to Google directly.

[Rich_995]

Thanks very much for your responses I really appreciate them.

CleverPhd -  we wouldn’t be giving total control of the domain away as we would design it, maintain it and add and remove products when we see fit. But I totally agree with you about them gaining a higher volume of organic and direct traffic and potentially doing what they want with it.

If they did decide not to sell our products it would mean ending the contract we have after an allotted time frame and either finding a new partner to design a new website and entering in a similar deal with them or start their own e-commerce operation which logistically is a huge undertaking, its taken us 15 years to build up relationships and offer the amount of products we sell so it’s not a viable option (at the minute anyway).

From the initial meeting they did stress that they didn’t want to run their online shop themselves and were happy to take a commission. They also gave a firm commitment to push the site through various media channels and their reach is huge. You said we would be at a disadvantage if the set up works out good or bad but either way we would be gaining more sales, just not increasing our brand reach through that channel. So in essence wouldn’t you just see it as separate revenue stream we could live without even if it fell apart?

Dimitri – Thanks, it looks like if we go ahead I’ll be insisting on canonical tags!

Don – Cheers for the alternatives and the offer to PM you.

I really appreciate the insight guys!

Rich

[donford]

Hello Rich,

I think giving them a copy of you domain would be a very bad choice. They will likely have the duplicate content problems as I am sure Google would "most likely" recognize you as the source of the content. Since you were around first. Basically, to Google, the site would be relegated to a low quality clone of yours and they would never see respectable SERP results. Ultimately not really helping either of you.

I am of the opinion there is an alternative solution out there, some off the top of my head....

• First, a referral program makes complete sense here, this is exactly the kind of situations in which referral programs were designed for.
• Second, let them build their own website with your products, provide support in the process but be careful to ensure they are in fact building their own site with their own branding and content. If they want your product descriptions make it clear that they must be accompanied by their own description ie (Manufacture Description | Our Description). Let the site evolve on its own, user reviews, testimonials, user images.. ect.
• Third, give them an incentive program. If they want to partner with you and it is beneficial then make it work for both of you. The exact details would need your input. My thinking is to offer their community an exclusive offer (5%-10%) off their first purchase of $X or more. Then pay your partner $X amount for each discount claimed, + X% of the next non-discounted sale. Obviously you would need to cross check that they are in fact a user of your partner's community which would involve some data exchange. You don't want people just posting the discount on the internet for anybody to use.

The actual solution I would recommend would require more information from both sides of the situation, The good thing here is you are in the power seat and nothing really can get done with out your say-so. I would recommend caution with giving anybody direct access to your content, if somebody wants it that means you are doing something right.

I hope this input helps you. I have had personal experience with duplicating a retail website for business to business sales. If you would like more thoughts feel free to PM me.

Don

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Duplicate content = problems. That's for sure. If website does get penalized, it would be the website, which will be considered scraper by Google. In your case (if your current website is indexed, ranking and don't have any penalties) it would be your partners. So, in theory you can bring a penalization to your partner

Or if sales increase as much as we think they might, would it be worth a penalty as our current rankings aren’t great?

Penalty is never good. It might seem ok in the beginning, but when you get hit, you gonna get screwed.

Now, my suggestion would be to go with partnership and give them a "copy" of your website, but put canonical links to every single page, linking back to your original one. Then it'll be win-win combination. Just make sure it's one of required and clear conditions to your partner.

Cheers.

[CleverPhD]

The duplicate content issue could be as simple as having them setup canonical links from their site to the same pages on your site so that Google would see where they originated from on your site.

I would not be concerned as much about the SEO implications, what about your business implications?  If the other site can sell all your products and controls the domain they are on, what happens when this other site now has all this great organic and direct traffic and decides to NOT to sell your products?  They can just take that subdomain traffic and direct folks to wherever and whatever product they want.

I am sure there are other reasons that you cannot mention here on why you all are considering this, but at face value, this agreement makes no sense to me.  If your product is so great and the other site has a great audience, they should just buy the product from you and sell it like any other wholesale type vendor relationship.

It sounds like they do not want to take the risk and would rather have your company take the risk.  Then, if this all works out ok, they have all the leverage to control the traffic.  You are at a disadvantage if this setup works out good or bad.

Good luck!