Sales Leakage Via Merchants Using Different Domains July 20th, 2007 11:08 am

Updating a competition site on a daily basis means you get around the web quite a bit and spot a few things that affiliate wise are a slight irritation but are forgotten about until the next visit. For example CDWow’s various affiliate promotions - including Just Rewards, Catalink, Audible, Plum Offers, VC Poker, Mobile Phones, Snapfish, Hotels.com, Lovefilm and Mutual Points all promoted on their homepage. That must be good for CDWow, but perhaps not so good for affiliates directing traffic into the site?

However, CDWow aren’t the only ones and more and more the distinction between merchant and affiliate is becoming blurred. Take for example Dixons, who this week launched Dixons Wines. The site dixons-wines joins partnerships Uswitch, Lovefilm and MyPix as well as sites like dixons-entertainment and dixons-speakers which are linked off Dixons.co.uk. Will affiliates who refer customers to Dixons earn from sales in any of these domains?

Another example is Asda! Asda use a number of domains like asda-entertainment, asda-mobiles, asda-electricals, asda-furniture, and whilst their affiliate program on Tradedoubler encompasses some of these sections, it doesn’t cover all of them. What bothers me as an affiliates it that with so many different domains will the program track across the sections? E.g. If I send a user to the CD section and they buy a washing machine (as you do) then will that sale track? There’s no indication to suggest it doesn’t on TD, but then again there’s no indication to suggest it does!

As more and more merchants blur into one by offering the same products and services in an attempt to stop the likes of Tesco grabbing every possible market, it would be good if they remembered that affiliates don’t like leakage points. On the same token, affiliates do like the opportunity to earn more revenue with a merchant, so when considering adding new departments to your site via new domains, take a moment to think about your affiliates!

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