u/Alternative-Mail-358

TL;DR: I built a huge automated affiliate solution but i went like shit.

Hi,

me and my friends from university built an affiliate shop in 2012, based on CakePHP back in the days. Each Domain had the whole shop logic below. The monolythic oldschool php approach.
The shops where mostly about fashion and furniture. The fashion shops didnt have so much revenue, because the goods have mostly low prices and people often send things back. I guess you know the problem. But the furniture shop generated \\\~1.500 Eu per month out of the blue. The shops went on, no one (we where 4 guys) really cared, and everything went down and crashed.

In 2016 i started my own business and i decided to rewrite everything from scratch.

The new approach:

\# Technically

Backend:
A central server, handling 12 Million products from 1000 merchants out of 5 different networks and multiple lightweight javascript based shops which comsume the API.

A Go import script that automatically detects the category, tags the products etc. (hundreds products / second...incredible speed)

Tech Stack: Laravel 11, Mysql, ElasticSearch (API), Golang

Frontend:
Nuxt3, pure API based, so very lightweight.

How to create a shop ? Create it on the main server, select the categories you want for your shop, and drag and drop it to the shop, publish, set the shop\\\_id on the frontend, and it pulls all categories and products and tags for that shop\\\_id and displays it.
The shops where prepared for onpage SEO, and everything was properly mobile optimized. (Mobile Pagespeed 40)

\# Team

1y ago i decided to give a SEO specialist, which is a friend of mine 50% of the revenues to "win the races with the car i built"

\# Costs

Central Server 100 eu/Month

Frontend Servers/IPs/Domains blabla 200 eu/Month

So roughly 300 per month overall.

\# How it went :/

We had 5 shops inside the 'race' and the impressions where low, the clicks where even lower. And the revenue was nearly Zero for the whole year. So 3600Eu for nothing here.

My friend, who could have 50% of the revenues did the following: He helped me with the onpage seo of the frontend (link structure, canonical tags, this and that) and developed a few ideas how to get the underlying data (do compare categories, tag, etc.). But then: Nothing. The only thing he told me "Without Trust there goes nothing". And his "solution" was to buy links.

After some time and no success i decided to stop everything from generating further costs and took it down.

Tbh: It makes me super sad how it went. Because i used all my energy to create this and it was my absolute "pet" project.

\# Questions

Does a purely automated affiliate shop with e.g. 200.000 products still make sense in 2024 ?

How could i solve the SEO "Chicken Egg" problem in general when it comes to Google Rankings ?

Is buying links the ultimate solution to ship around this "No Trust" dilemma ?

I hope that anyone of you can help me with some advice :/

TL;DR: I built a huge automated affiliate solution but i went like shit.

Hi,

me and my friends from university built an affiliate shop in 2012, based on CakePHP back in the days. Each Domain had the whole shop logic below. The monolythic oldschool php approach.
The shops where mostly about fashion and furniture. The fashion shops didnt have so much revenue, because the goods have mostly low prices and people often send things back. I guess you know the problem. But the furniture shop generated \\\~1.500 Eu per month out of the blue. The shops went on, no one (we where 4 guys) really cared, and everything went down and crashed.

In 2016 i started my own business and i decided to rewrite everything from scratch.

The new approach:

\# Technically

Backend:
A central server, handling 12 Million products from 1000 merchants out of 5 different networks and multiple lightweight javascript based shops which comsume the API.

A Go import script that automatically detects the category, tags the products etc. (hundreds products / second...incredible speed)

Tech Stack: Laravel 11, Mysql, ElasticSearch (API), Golang

Frontend:
Nuxt3, pure API based, so very lightweight.

How to create a shop ? Create it on the main server, select the categories you want for your shop, and drag and drop it to the shop, publish, set the shop\\\_id on the frontend, and it pulls all categories and products and tags for that shop\\\_id and displays it.
The shops where prepared for onpage SEO, and everything was properly mobile optimized. (Mobile Pagespeed 40)

\# Team

1y ago i decided to give a SEO specialist, which is a friend of mine 50% of the revenues to "win the races with the car i built"

\# Costs

Central Server 100 eu/Month

Frontend Servers/IPs/Domains blabla 200 eu/Month

So roughly 300 per month overall.

\# How it went :/

We had 5 shops inside the 'race' and the impressions where low, the clicks where even lower. And the revenue was nearly Zero for the whole year. So 3600Eu for nothing here.

My friend, who could have 50% of the revenues did the following: He helped me with the onpage seo of the frontend (link structure, canonical tags, this and that) and developed a few ideas how to get the underlying data (do compare categories, tag, etc.). But then: Nothing. The only thing he told me "Without Trust there goes nothing". And his "solution" was to buy links.

After some time and no success i decided to stop everything from generating further costs and took it down.

Tbh: It makes me super sad how it went. Because i used all my energy to create this and it was my absolute "pet" project.

\# Questions

Does a purely automated affiliate shop with e.g. 200.000 products still make sense in 2024 ?

How could i solve the SEO "Chicken Egg" problem in general when it comes to Google Rankings ?

Is buying links the ultimate solution to ship around this "No Trust" dilemma ?

I hope that anyone of you can help me with some advice :/