Difference between affiliates and resellers

By: Cristi Dorobantescu

Every once in a while I get a vendor asking: "What's the difference between affiliates and resellers"? I couldn't find a reliable internet resource to support my usual answer about it, so I thought why not make an article of my own and see how well it goes in Google. So here we are. Actually the biggest issue doesn't come from choosing between resellers and affiliates, but mostly from vendors that are questioning the channel conflict that might happen between their resellers/distributors and the affiliates. The questions are especially important in the software industry where some of the sales techniques are shared by both resellers and affiliates. The fact is that we don't actually have a conflict because there are some fundamental differences between them. Not in a particular order:
Affiliates only do online sales and marketing.Resellers have a physical office, they answer phone calls from customers and they take care of invoicing & billing locally and maybe do some technical support as well. Sure, some buyers might get the product online from an affiliate and not from the reseller, but still, the reseller has a different target and this is offline local market. Actually, if you think about it, a buyer that wants to purchase online, he can anyway skip the reseller by buying directly from your site.
Resellers are better for custom solutions/big volume purchases or complex packages that also include services. I can't really see or imagine an affiliate doing corporate, academic or governmental sales, or the way they could provide related add-on services in local markets. Affiliates don't train sales/technical people and therefore they might not be able to compete with the resellers who have in-depth knowledge about your products.
Affiliates mean pre-selling, resellers do selling. Affiliates warm the site visitor and make him confident and willing to make the purchase on the vendor site. So basically, the vendor sells directly to the customer and makes a direct invoice to the purchaser. Resellers should do the sale on their own, they purchase bulk products from the vendor, then sell by retail to customers; the invoice they issue to customers on their account.