MicroSites built for unique theme for targeting customers with Build in Shopping Cart

[Ben-HPB]

I now that microsites have been frowned upon by may marketers as well like by many marketers.

One of my ideas is say you have many different products on one website but sometimes it is a bit difficult to really find.

We have built an shopping cart that allows our vendors to build a store and use the cart as their own but running off our servers.

What if you take that and combine it with an affiliate marketing strategy but could control the content for each site.

Let's say we build a site themed for Weddings and only had those products available in the cart for that theme and it catered information about the product for use for Weddings.

Another example would be Baseball: We did the same concept with the shopping cart only having the baseball products on that site.

We would provide the details that this is powered by the main company and is a sister site.

Could this type of idea be beneficial to extend our products for people looking for the product via nitch vs just random?

No link would go back to the main site as it would be it's own site.

I am calling a microsite only because it is like one in combination of an affiliate site but without a tracking code link but a place where the customer can buy directly from without leaving the site.

[NakulGoyal]

Would you essentially have the same set of products with exact same product categories, product names, product descriptions ? If yes, this could lead to duplicate content issues. Also, since your "microsites" will be powered by the shopping cart on the main site, I am guessing all these microsites will have to be hosted on the same server ? In my opinion, there's definitely "some" value in trying to do this with this approach. It just depends on how big scale are we talking. I mean are you talking about 5 microsites or 50 ? It would be worth if you could build a wedding or a baseball related niche site with lots of good, unique content that is only on the microsite along with the products from the main site but having a different unique description that is different then your main-site. I would also start thinking about how would you build the domain authority / links to the microsites ? IMO this is a bigger discussion that you need to spend some time on.

[Ben-HPB]

Thx Nakul,

the product is for printed products such as banners, so breaking it down via nitch maybe able to narrow down the options for the customer when looking for such things as a wedding banner and we would of course have no duplicate content, titles, etc .....