Rapidly becoming as traditional as turkey and crackers are the annual affiliate Christmas competitions run by merchants to incentivise everyone in to promoting them as part of the festive run in. Leading the pack as ever are Prezzybox, who have a superb Dubai competition, and Buyagift who are offering top affiliates the chance to road trip in the USA during 2009.

Details of both promotions can be found over on A4U (USA Road Trip and Dubai) and whilst the path to riches is open to the usual suspects, new affiliates and those of us who find retail an impossible arena also have a chance with wildcard and most improved affiliate entry options. It’ll be a Christmas miracle if there’s a rubber duck on “affiliate tour” next year, but you never know.

Christmas also isn’t Christmas unless a merchant decides to drop their commissions. Play.com, who many affiliates may well have included in for their gift suggestion sites, announced that commission on PC and Electronics products will now be 0.5%, whilst consoles will earn you a massive 1%! I guess the drop is to do with margins, but I’m sure that Mr Play.com didn’t wake up this morning and decide this move, so a bit more notice than “immediate effect” would have been welcome.

Also dropping their commissions are HMV – although they’re only doing this when voucher codes are used. Affiliates will get a “1% commission rate on all sales where a voucher code has been redeemed. This includes any future codes, as well as existing codes, such as student discounts”.

No one seems to have mentioned this in yet another voucher codes argument! No doubt they’ll be plenty more of these in the run up to the 25th December.

Money saving and credit crunching are going to be even popular in the next couple of months and more online shoppers will be told how to find discounts to get cheaper gifts.

Having spoken to our users about discount codes, the general shopping method they used was “find the product and then find the codes (or cashback)”!

This presents a major challenge for affiliate marketing.

Affiliates need to adapt their thinking and perhaps start including codes (where available) in their “value added content”. If you’ve done the hard work in getting the user interested in your site/review/ppc ad and they’re about to click and earn you commission, why not just offer them the cherry on top as well?

Sadly you can’t change how some affiliates work (at least not overnight and without network support – one day they will all decide that “no code = no forced click” should be mandatory), nor can you change how people shop online – but you can change how you work. Give your users everything they need and all they then have to do is go shopping earning you commission – well in theory anyway!

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