Taking phone orders -- any affiliates doing this?

Previous thread talked about how few web orders we were handling. Within just a couple of days, this situation has been completely reversed -- so much so, that yesterday we celebrated our single biggest day ever for a single client -- and it turned out to be one heckuva weekend for sales.

However, looking at the source of call reports for this weekend, we see that a huge number of people are still using the website to investigate their purchase, and then actually phoning in the purchase because they would like to speak with a live person. This got us thinking...

We're thinking of approaching our clients and asking to take some of their phone business from them. Getting a new 800 # for each client and having them mapped directly to us. Considering we already have employees all over the country, we're well versed in phone systems, and already have a rebust phone system in place that could handle transferring a caller to the actual site if they were not calling to do a web sale.

Basically, it would work like this: We leave the client's current 800 #'s all through the sites, until the person reaches the product description page and the check-out page. On these pages alone, we provide an 800 # that comes to us and we handle the sale. We know the products very well, so training new employees to handle sales shouldn't be too difficult. We enter the sale directly into their database as if it were an online sale and notify the office that they do not need to follow up with the new sales client -- that they have alread been certified.

Now this involves us having to hire additional staff to handle the flux of calls, but at the same time, just 30 sales a day would double our monthly income verses online sales only (we get a specific amount for each sale, no matter what the final sale cost is). One full-time employee would only take 20% of income, so in the end, we're effectively left with an 80% profit margin (after other costs, we're still looking at 60-70% pre-tax profit).

Has anyone done this in niche markets? We work *very* closely with our clients, so I'm wondering if this could become a viable stream of income, or if it would be too many headaches to handle. We would obviously answer the phone as "XYZ Websites Sales -- may I help you?" instead of "XYZ, may I help you?" and *any* calls coming in that were not looking to buy, we would transfer immediately to the correct department within the client's office.

Thanks for any feedback.

A little confused, but if YOU are the affiliate, then I would not do this. Too much time and trouble for what it's worth.

What I would do if I were you is to ask your merchants to program a variable header that adds your affiliate id as a coupon code right next to or under the phone # so that you get credit for phone sales. I have implemented this type of tracking system for lots of merchants and it can work pretty well.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

We actually host our clients websites. We're not really an affiliate, but it was the closest thing I could think of when posting.