If you intend to sell worms online to your customers but source them from another supplier, you are probably interested in finding a supplier to drop ship worms.
At Meme's, we operate an affiliate program as opposed to a traditional drop ship program. Before we sell you on the idea of becoming an affiliate for Meme's Worms, let's understand the real difference between the drop shipping and affiliate models.
**If you're familiar with the Affiliate concept and ready to become a Meme's affiliate, please click here!**
**If you need bulk worms to sell to local customers or to repackage and sell to online customers, consider buying in bulk from us. Order a minimum of 8lbs in 8lb increments and we will ship them directly to you! Click here for Bulk Red Wigglers and here for Bulk European Nightcrawlers.
Most online sellers who don't grow their own worms take sales for a product on their own websites, then purchase that product at a discount from a supplier who then "drop ships" the product directly to the customer.
The online seller never touches the product.
This is how most online sellers of worms fulfill their orders. It works well, but has hidden costs to both the online seller and the drop shipper.
The affiliate model is different. At first, it seems very counterintuitive and even counterproductive for a new business.
With an affiliate program, an online seller refers website traffic directly to another supplier's website, in this case, Meme's Worms. This happens with one or several unique web addresses assigned to the online seller. These unique addresses (or "URLs") allow the supplier website - in the case, Meme's Worms - to understand where this website visitor came from.
When a sale happens through an affiliate website referral, the unique URL tells the supplier who credit for the sale. The supplier then sends a commission payment to the online seller who original referred the traffic.
Here is a rundown on how it goes:
Much Less Administrative Hassle
The administrative burden to you *and* the supplier is greatly reduced.
Unless there is a highly standardized or automated way of taking drop ship orders, a supplier has to handle multiple spreadsheets full of orders which must be manually entered into a shipping system.
The supplier then has to manually update each seller with the tracking after it has shipped. Those sellers then need to manually update their own systems with the tracking.
No Customer Service Issues
You do not have to handle customer service issues.
Shipping worms is risky and dead shipments happen from time to time, often because USPS or FedEx mishandled the shipment.
These are not YOUR problems.
Meme's will communicate with these customers and will coordinate for reshipment if necessary.
Lower Transaction Cost
Every transaction on the internet costs roughly 3% of the sales price. For drop shipping, you have two transactions; one to your website and another to the supplier.
With the affiliate model, only Meme's pays for the 3% transaction cost.
Commission Paid On Entire Purchase
This is one of the cooler things about being an affiliate. Let's say you refer your customer to Meme's via an affiliate link for 2lbs red wigglers. If this customer ends up buying an Urban Worm Bag, 8lbs of Red Wigglers, 8 lbs of European Nightcrawlers, and a master carton of bulk coco coir, you get a commission on the entire order.
Your profit increased from $7.9 to $80. You may not even realize it until your commission payment shows up.
We'll Recognize Your Customer for 30 Days
If your customer visits our website, but doesn't purchase that day, it's OK. This happens all the time as customer often do not make decisions based on one visit to a website.
If they come back within 30 days and make a purchase using the same web browser, our system will recognize them as your referral and we will give you a commission.
It's that simple.
It is always best to keep your affiliate products grouped with the other products that you sell yourself. This means that your outbound affiliate links should be on your product pages if at all possible.
The problem is that your affiliate product pages will have an "Add to Cart" or "Buy" button that will begin the checkout process on *your* website. Your product page will need some adjustment to replace the "Add to Cart"button with a button that links to Meme's Worms.
Below is an example of how Michigan-based WormCycle linked to Meme's Worms via their WordPress/WooCommerce website.
In this case, WooCommerce has a native functionality that allows replacement of the Add to Cart button with a button that links to other websites. It's super easy.
Urban Worm Company also links to Meme's Worms from their Shopify website. This required an inexpensive customization but it works just the same. We can help put you in touch with a Shopify Expert who can do this work for you.
By default, your Refersion affiliate link will link to the home page of Meme's Worms. This relies on the customer to navigate their way to the desired product page. Many of them will not do this successfully and you and Meme's will lose the sale.
You want to lead them directly to the product that you intend for them to buy.
For the best results, you should create several links, linking from your Red Wigglers product page to Meme's Red Wiggler product page. From Your European Nightcrawlers product page to Meme's European Nightcrawlers product page, and so on.
This is easily done from the Refersion Dashboard. Do the following process to get an affiliate link to a specific product:
Repeat the above process for each product you wish to link to. This will increase your "conversion rate" which is the percentage of your customers who end up successfully purchasing from Meme's Worms.
The images below will show you the process.
Most customers will not begin their shopping experience on your website by expecting to be referred to another website.
So on your product pages, it is helpful to inform your customer that they will be leaving your website. We also recommend letting your customers know that Meme's will take great care of them.
Because we will!
We look forward to seeing you sign up as an affiliate for Meme's Worms.
We understand that you were hoping to drop ship with us but we are not set up to handle the administrative burden of handling hundreds of orders via different spreadsheets and transmitting fulfillment data to you.
We *enjoy* paying our awesome affiliates and we hope that you will become one of them! We'll take great care of you and your customers.