Figleaves Give Voucher Code Sites a Wedgie With Pants Commission Cut
1 Comment December 4, 2008 / Posted in Affiliate Events, Affiliate MarketingPopular lingerie and pants retailer Figleaves have given discount code and cashback site owners a pre-Christmas wedgie in the form of a commission drop from 8% to 2% effective as of 11am on the 5th December (just over 12 hours notice). The decision for the change from decent commission to pants commission is as follows:
With up to 75% of affiliate generated customers using a Figleaves 20% off voucher code, in combination with the percentage revenue commission paid to affiliates, most customers generated by the affiliate programme are unprofitable for Figleaves. Clearly this is an unsustainable situation for Figleaves in the long run. Therefore, we are taking the short term approach of reducing commissions paid to voucher, cash back, loyalty and point’s scheme affiliates to a flat rate of 2%.
A full statement is in the discussions on Affiliates4U.
Whilst an unprofitable affiliate programme is not good for anyone and the popularity of codes and discounts is impacting on some merchants, in this case I do believe Figleaves are more than a little bit culpable…. hoisted by their own pants business decisions!
We’ve seen, like other affiliates, in the last few weeks 20% codes for Figleaves have either been offered to us via email for promotion or spammed on our forum. In both cases the codes did not come via the affiliate channel!
If these codes have been made public and other sites have had them posted on them, then it’s no wonder people are using them! The first rule of voucher code club is .. control your voucher codes – and Figleaves have failed to do this.
Why Figleaves allowed numerous codes to be spammed across the internet in the first place is beyond me (ok it’s good for “viral marketing”). No doubt they’ll still get sales (people will still look for codes, and the non-code sites will still get 8%) but it’s their relationship with the cashback and voucher code affiliates that will suffer – and if they can push large sale volumes to Figleaves, then they can also push sales to alternative merchants!
However, there is a simple solution to all this…
1. Set things up so that if the 20% discount code is used, any affiliate gets 2% commission
2. Invalidate all 20% codes & offer a customer a smaller discount as an apology!
3. Apologise to peed off siteowners for the spamming that was involved.
4. Come up with a suitable plan to keep everyone happy long term.
Could it really be that simple?
Additional Comment
Apparently this weekend (5th/6th December?) “Figleaves are launching the ultimate in Christmas promotions, customers will receive an automatic VAT free reduction on their orders (that’s a saving of 17.5%) AND free delivery on all orders over £75″…. surely a mere coincidence that this commission drop happened just before this sale takes place?
I agree wholeheartedly with your post and also think that it was no coincidence that around the 13 -14 of november I was flooded with figleaves vouchers submitted across a few sites. I certainly think that there was ‘organisation’ behind the distribution of the 20% off codes. From who – who knows.
Ta
Baz