Whitelabel Stores

Lawrence

Over the past few year we've been experimenting with a "whitelabel" feature for Brick Owl. This allows stores with their own web domain to host their store directly on Brick Owl. This removes the Brick Owl branding, and means they can then market their store directly. We know that some stores either have their own webstores, or want their own website so we hope this may fulfil that need. We also would like to support custom CSS so you can entirely change the look of the store.

I'd be interested to hear members thoughts on if this would be something they'd want to use? This would likely have a monthly charge.

Also, this has no effect on customers coming from Brick Owl. Any links to the store from Brick Owl will link to the normal subdomain, with all normal branding/css. Only the whitelabel URL has the whitelabel features.

You can see an example of this here https://www.thedailybrick.co.uk/

Magnusen

I would certainly be interested in that!

Stellar

A long time ago I tried something like this with an {iframe} in my domain, but it stopped working.

I would be interested in this service depending its cost, and a bit of customization would be great to differentiate yourself.

Hoddie

How does this work regards UK VAT - are sales still considered to pass through an OMP?

Calibrick

I would LOVE custom CSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

P6tu

Hello,

I also might be interested in such thing. At the moment I'm more at the buyers side, but I do have accumulated a quite conciderable stock of "leftover" pieces (around 25 000 parts from bricks to minifigs). I do have my own homepage that I am still building, but if it would be possible to combine the two, then that would be a marble.

Only thing, that has to be noted, is the custom CSS to make it match with my own homepage. And ofcourse - all depends on the fees eventually, since it would not be (in my case) concidered a source of income, but it should justify the reason to hold to it in general...

With regards,

Brickingamazing

Sounds perfect - something we'd love to see please (subject to the size of the monthly charge anyway).

unbrickable

would be really interested in this and would be great if i could customize the webshop with my own look and feel / pages.

SilentMode

That would be great!

Lawrence

This is now available for other stores to try out here https://www.brickowl.com/mystore/settings/whitelabel_settings

Brickingamazing

Will orders placed directly with our whilelabel sites be flagged in any way as is the case with orders referred by affiliate sites etc please? It would be beneficial to be able to identify how much revenue we can drive to our sites to judge if the £120 fee per year can be covered.

Also what do we point our domain at please? Presume we need to update the WWW or add a CNAME etc?

Lawrence

Yes, the source is highlighted on the order details page. Once enabled, the form should show what to set the DNS records to

vegitt

@Lawrence small typo in the first paragraph on the settings page

" Once enabled, it removes all marketplace branding to visitors of your doamin"

Lawrence

Thank you, I will get that corrected

Geert Middelman

I would be interested as long as it does not interfere or interrupt the benefit of being part of the 'group' (easy buying, rebrickable, etc etc).

Lawrence

It does not have any impact on your “normal” store, it only allows the addition of the custom domain

unbrickable

@Lawrence could you already tell anything about what the pricing / model would be ?

Lawrence

So far we have 9 stores that have successfully enabled this and got the DNS setup. I personally think it looks particularly nice with a logo that compliments the colour scheme like https://stellarbricks.com/

@unbrickable This is on the whitelabel page, it will be £10/month in a few months time.

CodeSoka

Will it ever go lower than that? I really would like too do it, but I really don't want to pay that much.

TorontoLego

It's an interesting idea, but 120gbp/year sounds like too much for all but a very few stores.

unbrickable

I heat a few comments about its expensive. I think its awesome!

hosting your own (good) working wevshop would cost you a lot more not even mentioning the work to get a whole lego database with photos.

Ofcourse there are people who can do this but even then you need to maintain it and update the webshop with new info and pictures and sync it to the other platforms.

With this feature @Lawrence makes this possible to do all this with only a domain and a checkmark in your dashboard.

Hoddie

I think the issue I have is that the white label stores are being supported by a community-built catalogue, but the community doesn't get anything in return for having supported these white label stores. I suppose if these white label stores help support the future of Brick Owl, that's something we all benefit from, but that supposes BO's future was at risk.

Also, I'm not sure that the UK's and Norway's VAT regime would consider sales via these white label stores as being made through an OMP.

Calibrick

I would argue the community does get a benefit from whitelisted stores... those stores are still paying BO commission, which are the fees that support BO global ongoing improvements which we all benefit from. That's just my humble, respectful opinion... obviously it's better for other stores if a store exclusively resides here (as if they're out of stock of an item, customers can then easily find it from another store).

Perhaps there is consideration given to an automatic message on all whitelisted stores: Don't see what you're looking for here today? Check out https://brickowl.com! Just thinking out loud, don't want to take away the bennies of whitelisting. :-)

CodeSoka

I 100% agree with @Calibrick !

Brickingamazing

@Lawrence is it by design that robot.txt entries prevent the indexing of some pages on a whitelisted store please? For example we see 'Blocked by robots.txt' from Google on page /store/lego-minifigures but indexing works fine on others?

Lawrence

@BrickingAmazing Unfortunately this is necessary for all Brick Owl stores to prevent a possible duplicate content penalty by Google. If we had thousands of stores with thousands of the same pages

Brick-Slayer

@Lawrence I cannot get past this error "The domain may only contain lowercase letters, numbers, and decimal seperators" my domian name is www.brick-slayer.com i believe the dash is causing the error but that is the actual domain.

Lawrence

I have changed the validation, so you should now be able to submit that

Brick-Slayer

@lawerence I got it to accept my domain but im confused on what I enter for the dns.

ChorleyBricks

Great idea. I have been using this, since it cam eout, but hae to admit, I will be turning this off, as soon as chargeable @£10 per month. My personal reason is, I'm generating traffic t my whitelabel site, I pay the usual commssion for sales, if someone comes to my shop, and cannot find what they need, then they move on anyway. I can simply forward my domain to the usual store.brickowl version and makes no difference to me. I don't require any changes to my shop css or such, as this is great for me in conjunction with my BL store. I simple send non Lego enthusiasts here, as I did before, due to the better visual experience to buy sets etc. £5 / month and I'd probably just pay that. without messing about. £10 is too much. My analytics show only 3 orders via whitelabel all of which I drove to my shop. So, maybe I'm missing the USP on this, so far I'm happy and need more stock and continue with FB ads and posts.
PS: is a facebook whatchamacallit possible? for ads etc?