Making money online - E-Commerce Revenue Model

E-Commerce revenue models specifically describe different techniques used in generating income from the publisher's websites. As the e-commerce progress, the traditional revenue model of sales is expanded to more variety of revenue options and e-commerce business model.

Publishers is referred as the website content provider as well as individual bloggers' blogs.

The common techniques are:

Sales - Sales of goods, merchandise information and services provided in the publishers' websites. Example: Dell.com is generating sales revenue from its notebooks, Amazon.com is selling books, ABC Consultant may be generating income from their consultancy services online.

Transaction fees - Commission earned based on either the volume of the transactions (the higher the volume, the higher the transaction fees will be) or fee per transaction conducted at the website (a fixed fee per trade regardless of the volume). Example: E-Bay may earned transaction fees from each successful transaction made by the bidders or sellers.

Advertisement fees - Publishers can allocate some advertisements spaces in their website for other companies to place their banners or advertisement, in return for a fee named advertisement fees. A major percentage of Yahoo and Google's yearly income is generated from the advertisement fees. Small companies and bloggers can also provide advertisement space for interested parties.

Subscription fees - customers would have to pay a fixed amount of fees either monthly or yearly when they are subscribing to contents and services offered by the website. Example: Yearly subscription fees for accessing the online journal databases, privileged discounts for members.

Affiliate fees - Companies receive commissions for referring customers to others' websites. It can include CPM (cost per thousand impressions), CPC (cost per click) and CPA (cost per acquisition/action). These methods are becoming more and more popular nowsaday especially for bloggers. Example: Google Adsense, Amazon.com Associates affiliate programme, Advertlets.com (I wrote a review here), Nuffnang (Asia 1st Blog Advertising Community) and lots more. This section will be further elaborated in the near future.

Most of the professional bloggers use the combination of affiliate, transaction and advertisement strategies in generating income. Example: Liewcf, JohnChow and lots more.

There will be more discussion on these topics in this blog in the future as well as on new and innovative e-commerce business model.