Kelkoo are the latest brand to launch a cashback site. They join The Mirror and The Sun who are all trying to jump on board the bandwagon. It’s a sensible move by Kelkoo who must, like many affiliates, see users coming in to their site, finding their content and then going off elsewhere to collect codes or cashback. However, with just 25% on offer to shoppers they’re not going to be land-grabbing from established sites who offer higher percentages.

Unlike The Sun, who perhaps in response to The Mirror’s media muscle, have started giving their Greasypalm white label a bit of a plug and seemed to have grabbed a large slice of the cashback pie. In Saturday’s edition (22nd November 2008) they even announced how they’re own Captain Crunch had saved Brits £9m on his website. Talk about marketing license (or total BS if you like). The £9m actually refers to the Greasypalm network since inception not to The Sun’s own cashback which has been running for a month or so (unless Submission Technology is now owned by News International!).

The Mirror continue to plug their own new cashback offering without such wild claims – but at the same time they’re promoting a competitor – something most traditional affiliate’s would try and avoid. In Sunday’s “Your Money” (23rd November) they featured a case study about how “vouchers cut my bill in half“. The article tells us how “Beth uses voucher websites to get money off and also earns cashback on purchases” – and mentions the usual suspects of myvouchercodes and quidco (although they don’t mention it’s 100% cashback or whether she uses one site to find a code and then goes to the other to claim cashback – that of course would never happen!).

With the credit crunch, recession, deflation and anything else money saving related in the news it’s generally one or the other (or even both) of these formidable affiliates mentioned in various articles… the swines. LOL!

Codes and cashback are the bandwagons everyone want’s to be on!

So What About These Clones?

On one hand we have big brands trying to offer cashback to their users, albeit not as competitive as the major player in the arena in terms of cashback, and on another we have affiliates, through the use of the likes of icodes, promotions.co.uk and the Affiliate Future framework perhaps hoping to generate “the next myvouchercodes”.

In other words come 2009 there’s going to be proliferation of cashback (as more big brands give it a try) and code sites (as affiliates and big brands get easier access to them via 3rd parties if they ever stop arguing with each other) – but not all of them are going to be successful.

The reason for this is that they are simply replicating what has already gone before. Trying to make a cashback site work AND continue to grow in the face of a 100% cashback competitor personally I think is a tough call – for big brands and especially smaller ones!

Clones of code sites are a different matter as the content is usually on an equal footing (i.e. we all have access to a pool of similar deals and offers). However, it’s important to try and not just be a clone of MVC. So if you are jumping into the code arena and are using iCodes, promotions or other services make sure you’re giving your site unique content and plenty of customisation.

The winners of the codes and cashback clone wars will be those affiliates and big brands who come up with something better than what already exists… either that or they have to somehow force their users to “prefer” their codes/cashback over the already established alternatives (and even that method isn’t guaranteed good results).

2009 promises to be another interesting year for codes, cashback and affiliate marketing.

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