Mirror Website how to approach my vendor to allow it?

[Erwin]

Mirror Site - Mirror Website -
I am was going to pay a company to build me an e-commerce website for about $1,750.00 US Dollars. I have already paid that company a down payment to get started. I want to sell cell phone accessories on the web. I currently have a Vendor that Wholesales to me, and is also a manufacturer of the cell phone accessories. They want us to grow and expand with them, and they have told us how they would like us to become wholesalers in our area, and surrounding cities and states. My designer that i have hired, was trying to contact my vendors web support person, and try and get all their HD pictures of about 5 thousand products and descriptions. The Web Support person, called me and told me that it was too much work and suggested something AMAZINGLY AWESOME, that I was very excited about. Which is mirroring their website which cost them like 50 thousand to build. I thought that was amazing. What the web support person told me is that my only obstacle is to convince the owners to accept, and they can use my Domain name and use my Logos, and make it to where I can manage my own clients, and take my customers orders.

Now my question for here is, .... "I am trying to EMAIL the owners of a cell phone accessories wholesale and manufacturing company, that I would like to mirror their website. HOW do i even start this email, how would i format it to make it look professional?, How can I ask them nicely yet professionally, What do I write that will make it look like i am doing them a favor by mirroring their website.?? "

Here is how THEY benefit. We buy currently about $4,000 cost in product from them from just 2 cell phone stores that i own, Now here is my upper hand, they really like me, so the relationship part is great. they always offer us to take more and pay later. Also, if I do wholesale for them, we can get many stores in our local market to purchase from us, and that means we make money and THEY make money. so its a win win. but i want to write this email like its of their benefit to do the mirror site. even tho i want it so much. Now, if i am lucky, they wont charge me to mirror it, because they flew me to their office and kept telling me how they want us to wholesale in different states, and how much business and potential we have. with that being said, all of your guys help is much appreciated.


thanks
Erwin.

[Jake]

Generally duplicating another site content is going to get poorer search engine ranking due to "duplicate content", if you are planning to just use paid advertising it's less of an issue. I don't know a that much about ecommerce methods, some suppliers may have rss feeds of their catalog data that almost automatically populates pages.

One general trick is to iFrame a site so it appears inside of your own site pages, your typically stuck with the links they have on their page so it's probably not of value.

[Scott]

If you mirror their website, you will be doomed in organic search. Google will NOT like the site at all, so while you will save in the development cost, you will never rank well in Google and likely could get banned. This could also potentially harm the site you are mirroring, so they will likely NEVER go for it. - It is just too plain risky.

*IF* you do somehow end up mirroring their content I would suggest that you block all those pages from Google and try to build out other highly relevant content to support the site. If you block the mirrored pages you eliminate the risk of Google Panda destroying you for scraping the content.

$1700 for a full build of an eCommerce website is super cheap - I imagine they are using some predefined templates and would then just import the database of products, but even still.

Best of luck!