White-label SaaS for agencies: how it works and who owns what

White-label SaaS lets an agency sell software it didn’t build under its own name. It works when everyone knows their part: the platform runs the software, the agency owns the brand and the client relationship, and the client owns its business.

What white-label SaaS means

SaaS, or software as a service, is software you use in a browser and pay for by subscription, instead of installing it. White-label SaaS adds one step: the company that builds the software lets other businesses sell it under their own names.

For agencies, this is how you can offer a product, such as an online store builder, without writing or hosting it. Your clients see your product name, sign your terms and pay your price. The platform company works in the background. Our guide to white-label ecommerce explains how this looks for online stores in particular; this article is about the structure underneath it, and who owns what.

The three parties and two contracts

Every white-label SaaS arrangement has the same shape:

• The platform builds, hosts and updates the software, and sells it wholesale to agencies.
• The agency brands the software as its own product, sets the retail price, signs up clients and gives them front-line support.
• The client uses the product to run its business, and pays the agency.

Two contracts hold this together. The platform–agency contract sets the wholesale fee, what you may brand, which countries and currencies you can sell in, and the platform’s duties to you. The agency–client contract is your own terms of service, privacy policy and, where personal data is involved, a data-processing agreement. The client usually has no contract with the platform at all.

If you remember one thing: your client’s contract is with you. Whatever the platform promises you, your clients will hold you to what you promised them, so make sure your terms never promise more than the platform contract gives you.

Who owns what in a white-label SaaS?

Data, domains and exit terms deserve a closer look than one table can give. We cover them in who owns a client’s store on a white-label platform.

Who does what, day to day

The platform

• Keeps the software running, secure and up to date. See what a white-label platform handles for you.
• Builds new features and fixes bugs for every partner at once.
• Reviews partners before they go live, to protect the product everyone shares.

The agency

• Chooses the brand, sets the plans and prices, and publishes its own legal pages.
• Finds and signs up clients, and answers their questions first.
• Watches its stores: who is on trial, who is near a limit, who has stopped paying. Doing this for many clients at once is covered in how to run dozens of client stores from one console.

The client

• Runs its own shop: products, orders, customers and offers.
• Pays the agency for its plan.
• Decides how much access the agency has to its store.

How the money works

The usual model is a wholesale fee per client account per month, paid by the agency to the platform, and a retail price per month, paid by the client to the agency. The difference is the agency’s margin. Some platforms also take a percentage of the client’s sales, which grows as the client grows; ask about this before you sign.

As an example only: if your wholesale fee for a plan were 20 a month and you charged 50, you would keep 30 a month for each client on it, before your own costs. The full method, including set-up fees and yearly plans, is in agency margin maths, and how to package the monthly fee for clients is in how to charge clients monthly for an online store.

What can go wrong

• Promising more than the platform does. If a feature isn’t built, don’t sell it. Ask the platform for a straight list of gaps.
• A thin brand. If the client meets the platform’s name at every turn, they will eventually go to the platform directly. Check every place the client looks.
• No exit plan. If the platform closes or you outgrow it, can your clients take their data and domains with them?
• Support you can’t give. Clients will call you. Make sure you can see enough to help them without asking for passwords.

Many of these come down to how you launch; see mistakes agencies make when they launch a white-label platform. And if you are weighing up writing your own software instead, read build your own ecommerce SaaS or white-label one?.

How it works with DripFunnel

DripFunnel’s partner programme is white-label SaaS for ecommerce, used by more than 75 partners across the globe. Here is how each part of the structure works today.

• Platform–agency contract: you talk to us and agree terms, including a wholesale fee per store per month for each plan, the currencies you can price in, and whether the “Powered by DripFunnel” line can be removed.
• Your brand: product name, colours, font, logos, sign-in background, support email and help centre link. You preview the merchant portal on desktop and phone, in light and dark, then publish. See Put your brand on the merchant portal.
• Your address: the merchant portal runs on your own address, such as store.youragency.com. Each client’s shop gets a free my-store.one address and can connect its own domain.
• Agency–client contract: your own terms of service, privacy policy and data-processing agreement are linked in the portal. They are required before we approve you.
• Your plans and prices: you decide what each plan includes, up to DripFunnel’s maximum, and the console shows DripFunnel’s fee and what you keep on every price.
• The client’s side: the client is the owner of their store. They set their own password, run their own products, orders and customers, and can export them as spreadsheet files (Export your data). The AI builds their storefront from a plain description.
• What you see: each store’s plan, status, usage and last month’s sales, never its orders, customers or products. To help inside a store, you open a read-only, 30-minute support session that the client’s support access allows, and every session is logged.
• Your team: Owner, Admin, Support, Finance and Read-only roles, with two-factor sign-in that you can require for everyone.

Some things are not built yet, and we say so: the console and portal are in English only, there is no partner-level API, and emails to your clients go out in your name and colours but not yet from your own email domain.

Ready to talk about your clients? Contact our partner team, or read Join the partner programme and go live to see the set-up steps first.

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