White-label ecommerce: what it is and how agencies use it

Run online stores for your clients under your own brand. How white label differs from referral programmes and from building every shop yourself.

What white-label ecommerce means

“White label” means a product made by one company and sold by another under its own name. In ecommerce, it means an online store builder that an agency can offer to its clients as its own service. The agency chooses the name, the logo and the colours. The platform company runs the servers, writes the software and keeps it up to date.

For your client, the shop owner, the experience is simple: they sign in to a portal that carries your agency’s brand, they add products and take orders, and when they need help they contact you. For you, it means you can offer online stores without hiring developers or maintaining code.

Three ways agencies offer online stores

Most agencies that build shops for clients work in one of three ways. Each has its place, and many agencies mix them.

Referral programmes are the easiest to start: you recommend a store builder and get paid for it. Shopify’s Partner Program, for example, pays partners a share of the revenue from clients they refer, build or launch. The catch is that the client becomes the platform’s customer, under the platform’s name, and the terms of your income are the platform’s to change.

Building every shop yourself gives you full control, but every update, security fix and broken plugin is your problem, and the work grows with every client.

A white-label ecommerce platform sits in between. You own the client relationship and the price, and the platform owns the technology.

Who a white-label online store builder suits

White-label ecommerce works best for agencies that already have clients who sell, or want to sell, online:

• Web agencies that design websites and keep getting asked for “a shop too”. Instead of a one-off build, you offer a shop on a monthly plan.
• Marketing agencies that run ads, social media or email for retailers. A shop under your brand keeps the whole journey, from ad to checkout, in your hands.
• Agencies with a niche, such as fashion, food or local retail, that can set up plans and templates for that kind of business and reuse them for every client.

It suits you less if you only build one or two shops a year, or if every client needs heavy custom code. In those cases a project-based build may still be the better fit.

What your client sees and what you see

Your client, the shop owner

• A merchant portal with your product name, logo, colours and font, on your own address, such as store.youragency.com.
• Your support email, help centre and legal pages, so when they need help they come to you.
• Emails sent in your name, with your colours and your support contact.
• The plans you created, at the prices you set, in the currencies your contract allows.
• Their own shop on a free address, or on their own domain once they connect it.

You, the agency

• A partner console that lists every client store with its plan, status and last month’s sales.
• Plans you build yourself: what each includes, its limits, a free trial if you want one, and monthly and yearly prices.
• A team with roles, so your support staff can help clients while your finance staff see billing.
• Reports on growth, revenue and usage across all your stores.

A good white-label platform shows you a store’s account, plan and totals, not its customers’ details. In DripFunnel, partners see figures such as sales and order totals, never the shop’s orders, customers or products.

How white-label ecommerce works with DripFunnel

DripFunnel’s partner programme is a white-label ecommerce platform for agencies. More than 75 partners across the globe run stores on it. In short:

1. Talk to us. Tell us how many stores you run or plan to run, and where. We agree your wholesale fee and contract.
2. Set up your brand. Add your product name, logo, colours, font, support details and legal pages, and preview the portal on desktop and phone, in light and dark. The guide is in the help centre: Brand your merchant portal.
3. Connect your address. Put the merchant portal on your own domain. The console gives you the records to add and checks them for you: Your portal address.
4. Build your plans. Choose what each plan includes and set your prices. For each price, the console shows DripFunnel’s fee and what you keep: Create your plans.
5. Submit for approval. We sign up as a test merchant and check your branding, plans and legal pages, usually within 2 business days.
6. Open your first stores. Create stores for your clients, or share your sign-up link: Create and manage stores.

Your clients get everything a DripFunnel shop has, including the AI that designs a storefront from a description, and no fee taken on their orders. See what a shop includes on Pricing.

Questions to ask before you choose

Not every “white-label” offer is the same. Before you sign, check how much of the brand is really yours, who sets the prices, what you can see about your clients’ stores and how the platform reviews partners. We’ve written a full checklist: Choosing a white-label ecommerce platform. And if you’re wondering how to package and price shops for clients, read How agencies can sell online stores as a monthly service.

More on white-label ecommerce

This article starts our series on white-label ecommerce for agencies, with new guides added regularly, each answering one question in depth. When you’re ready to talk about your own agency, tell us about the shops you run.

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