Greasy Palm to offer white label services

GreasyPalm.co.uk, one of the UK’s largest consumer rewards websites, announces the launch of their white label cashback services.

Intended for top tier websites and other media owners with established platforms, the white label proposition allows partners of GreasyPalm to offer their own branded cashback shopping service from which their members can earn cash rewards with over 850 participating retailers.

Neil Durrant, Marketing Director of GreasyPalm comments, “We’re very pleased to offer white label partnerships out to media owners, enabling them to generate an additional revenue stream and give added value to their audience.”

“From our experience in the marketplace as the UK’s first cashback shopping website, we have seen the massive popularity of cash rebates firsthand having reached the 750,000 member milestone ourselves with over £4.5 million in cashback awarded to our members.”

“Established media owners including newspapers, magazines and radio stations can all now tap into this popularity with ease allowing their audience to access a cashback shopping service, fully managed by the most experienced team in the UK, under their own brand.”

“We fully expect the service to be a massive success and are looking forward to creating successful and lasting partnerships throughout the media industry.”

Visit GreasyPalm’s white label cashback service for further details.

March 30th, 2007 Posted by scifind | Uncategorized | no comments

ASOS Being Talked About (Again)

This time by a minor publication called THE TELEGRAPH, found on their business section (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/03/28/ccdiary28.xml) we get to see those 3 offensive words again “grubby little people” in reference to Affiliates.

Quoted from the Times:

Robertson’s rant is like Ratner revisited

Has Nick Robertson, the chief exec of internet retailer ASOS, done a Gerald Ratner?

He’s told trade mag New Media Age that the company’s online advertising agents are “grubby little people in grubby studios growing income at our expense”.

That’s an interesting way to talk about your friends, and it’s caused an almighty stink on the net, so what’s the company got to say now?

“This was taken out of context,” smooths a spokesman.

How, exactly?

“Well, I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But Nick wasn’t saying anything about ASOS, it’s products or its customers so I don’t think you can call it a ‘Ratner’ as such.” He continues to explain that ASOS has stopped using affiliates, “but that doesn’t mean we won’t in the future”. Want to bet?

 

SO Ok ASOS when and where are you attempting to relaunch your affiliate scheme?

March 29th, 2007 Posted by scifind | affiliate marketing, affiliate | one comment

Beware Extra Fees On NOCHEX

This information might be of interest to merchants accepting Nochex as a payment option.

Nochex is a low cost payment system ideal for lower volume ecommerce vendors and ebay vendors, often used along side, or inplace of other cc processors or paypal

Nochex - sometimes talked about as the UK paypal - is starting to get complaints in the way that the ‘payement gateway’ processes credit card payments.

On Working Lunch today (BBC2) there were claims that credit card purchases using the Nochex service were treated as cash advances, and because of such they were subject to additional charges and much higher interest rates.

This can be a real pain if you are using the service for ‘micropayments’ - especially downloads, that may only cost the user £1, might cost nearly 5 times that with the addition of credit card fees.

Nochex have responded with the following warning on their payment pages.

Please be aware that a limited number of card issuers may charge you a cash advance fee for funding this transaction by credit card. This is not a charge made by Nochex.

This is accompanied with a link to a very short help article:

Cash Handling Fees
 Some Visa and MasterCard issuers (including Capital One, GM, MBNA, Mint, Sainsbury’s and Tesco) may charge you a cash handling fee when using your credit card to fund a Nochex payment.

If you are unsure whether you will be charged a cash handling fee we recommend that you either speak to your card issuer before you make the payment or choose an alternative card (such as your debit card) to make the payment from.

This fee is not charged by either the Merchant to whom you are sending this payment or by Nochex.

This is slightly worrying. I personally don’t use Nochex, but I do use PayPal alot. I am starting to wonder if there are similar issues with these other ‘Micropayment’ card payment processors?

If anyone knows the answers please post a comment!
 

March 27th, 2007 Posted by scifind | eBay, ecommerce, paypal | one comment

Someone should have read my datafeed post!

Just had an email from DDHE

 DDHE - Product feed updated with URL field

lol

Someone really should have read my post on datafeeds

DDHE is a great brand, and don’t let this little mistake put you off promoting them. They only launched the datafeed the other day - so it is thumbs up as they corrected their error in a very short time.

If you want to promote them they are on Affiliate Future

March 23rd, 2007 Posted by scifind | Uncategorized | no comments

Affiliates that make no sales within 1 week of signing up are dumped by merchant

After the ‘grubby’ comments we have all been very interested in of late, a current merchant now seems to be taking a very dim view of affiliates who don’t make any sales within 1 WEEK of signing up.

This was brought to light on an a4u forum post - http://www.a4uforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=57115

 Quote from Merchant:

Unfortunately due to the fact that your website has not generated any clicks to the (edit - merchant’s) website and therefore no sales, also decreasing the program position within the AWIN index, we find ourselves in the position of suspending you from the program.

I have never seen the point of a merchant dumping affiliates on performance - the whole point of affiliate marketing is the fact that it is a PERFORMANCE related model - the merchant doesn’t pay anything extra to the network because of numbers of affiliates joined.

Even then - dumping an affiliate after 1 week is very poor, maybe 3 months, but definitly not 1 week! The affiliate has had no chance to place banners - build sites and start getting revenue from PPC campaigns. The one really bad thing is that the affiliate may have spend a whole working week doing the above, and looking to make it live the next day, result wasted time for the affiliate!!!

What is the AM world coming too.

Looking out for next weeks shock affiliate decision of the week.

March 23rd, 2007 Posted by scifind | affiliate marketing, affiliate | no comments

Moving On….

After careful consideration I am handing the affiliate management of ForbiddenPlanet back to their inhouse team. ForbiddenPlanet has a strong inhouse team dedicated to their fantastic range of products. Their program is both inhouse and on affiliatefuture if you still wish to check it out.

But do not fret I am not leaving Affiliate Marketing / Management industry already, infact I am doing quite the opposite. Aiming to strengthen my position in this fantastic industry.

Currently I am now doing consultancy work with Azam Inc, helping to support the affiliates of Mosaic Holidays (AF), Purple Parking (AF) and EasyFlirt  (International White Label Dating) and my company Scifind Ltd will have some more great affiliate management clients coming in the next few weeks.

Nadeem Azam has been a good friend for a while now and I am privaliged to be working with Azam Inc, like myself and my company Scifind Ltd, Azam Inc is dedicated in giving the best support to affiliates and working with merchants to better understand affiliate marketing.

Only receintly has Azam inc announced that Mosaic Holidays has increased it’s online booking discount to 8% and had telephone numbers removed in order to increase conversions. It is also worth poining out that Mosaic Holidays has a very competitive 5% commission rate in an industry where 2-3% now seems the norm.

You can sign up with Mosaic on AffiliateFuture Here or find more information on Azam.biz

March 21st, 2007 Posted by scifind | affiliate marketing, affiliate, ForbiddenPlanet | no comments

Now This Is A Better Way to Run an Affiliate Program

Mosaic Holidays - Online booking discount increased to 8% and telephone numbers removed

Mosaic Holidays specialises in luxury, affordable holidays around the world. The affiliate program pays an impressive 5% commission on all sales (minus small booking fee, which includes the credit card charge etc.).

To boost affiliate sales, the online booking discount has been increased from 5% to an incredible 8%. Also, the telephone numbers have been removed from the top of the pages. Alongside refinements to the website, these significant changes should result in improved conversion rates and even more commission for affiliates!You can get detailed information about the affiliate program here.

My particular interest in this program?

I (Brian Edwards) am joining the Azam Affiliate Management team as an Affiliate Management Consultant.

If you wish to contact me about Mosaic Holidays or Azam Inc’s other affiliate marketing clients such as EasyFlirt or PurpleParking feel free to email brian AT azam.biz or ring me on 01480 890417  / Mobile 07952 987265

March 16th, 2007 Posted by scifind | Uncategorized | 2 comments

Soundtrack to ASOS Backlash!

What do you get if you take a popular video sharing site, a hyped quote from ASOS and an affiliate who can sing?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q_YruUZFcNA

Any one for more topical affiliate songs?

Maybe Weird Al Yankovic will enter into this arena after his ebay song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYokLWfqbaU

Probably not.

March 12th, 2007 Posted by scifind | Uncategorized | one comment

What The F*** Do I Want A Product Feed For?

Product Feeds / Data Feeds

What ever you want to call them.

Historically product feeds are poorly formatted / infrequently updated / have incorrect information / have poor or no category structure. Wait - no that is actually still the case

These are now an increasingly important part of any affiliate program, from both the perspective of the affiliate and the merchant. Product feeds benefit both affiliate and merchant - for the same reasons as remember the affiliate only gets paid when sales are generated for the merchant.

Datafeeds help the affilliate in the following ways:

• Contextual advertising. The affiliate can take keywords from their article and use them to query their product database (built from one or more datafeeds)  and use this to display products relevent to the article.
• Inclusion of merchants products in a site search.
• Price Comparison Applications. Still very popular with affiliates. This speeks for itself really.
• Store Fronts. Datafeeds are still used to produce mini webstores / minisites for portals. This is not a bad thing from the merchants point of view as the affiliate is not so much competing with you (with your content) but competing against your competitiors (and their affiliates) for that ever so crucial listing in the search engines. Often affiliates have a very good understanding of SEO and to allow affiliate to operate their own store front of the merchants store is alot cheeper and more accountable way of promoting products through natural listings.
• Novel ‘Mashups’. It is harder to talk about these - but with the availability of data an affiliate with a little inspiration can make sticky web applications that include affiliate links to products that the visitor is actually interested.

In short affiliates can be lazy and love to be spoonfed information. But when they can throw that information into a web application and send you 100s of sales a month - why worry. For the 10 minute job of a data export from shopping cart software a merchant can have loads to gain and very little to lose.

Advice for Merchants re Datafeeds:

Get it right. Look at your network’s recommendation for product feeds structure and encoding.

The MINIMUM fields that you will be expected to provide are:

Product Name, Product Price, Product URL, Product Image, Product Description, Product Category.

Regarding the product description - you may possibly want to use an alternative description of the product than the one that is used on your site.  This is because search engines can give penaltys to sites that display content that is duplicated across the web

March 8th, 2007 Posted by scifind | Uncategorized, affiliate marketing, product feeds, datafeeds | 5 comments

ASOS - Everyone is on about this so I will be the sheep

Ok so if you are in the Affiliate Marketing community and you don’t have your head in the sand you should have seen this quote:

“Next year we’ll reintroduce affiliate marketing but as it should be, as opposed to affiliates as they were” said Nick Robertson, ASOS CEO. “(There’ll be) no silly commissions being paid to grubby little people in grubby studios growing income at our expense, getting in the way of genuine sales”

OK so one of the former drivers of affiliate marketing - ASOS (formerly asseenonscreen) have decided to re enter the indusry that they exited in a rather rocky way, in a rather rocky way.

If this quote is accurate and not taken out of context (I got the quote from a4uforum) then it is really the best way to alienate yourself from a community that you still have a little to prove to.

ASOS were great Jess Luthi managed the program and everyone was happy. Then she left and ASOS were determined to take what they had gained from the affiliate (profile and customers) and strive to continue with out the “grubby little people” that had built its customer base and brand.

Now they go to reenter the market, and ok people would have forgiven them for leaving and trying other things, but to make the statement above really does alienate the big affiliates that worked with ASOS in the first place. Also is 8-10% commission for clothing seem silly? I don’t think so - the markups on clothing can be fantastic in the UK and this bearly scratches the surface in my experience.

Will I be promoting ASOS again - I don’t think so. But this is not to do with this quote. I did well for a short while promoting ASOS but I have moved on from this. The site I was running back then has moved on. It as good while it lasted and now there is MUCH more choice on who can be promoted that I haven’t missed them for the last 2 years and I won’t miss them if they start again.

Had their program had been more suitable to my sites as they stand now I would promote them - but be slightly wary and keep an eye of them as this quote just throws that little bit of doubt over their future in affiliate circles.

March 8th, 2007 Posted by scifind | Uncategorized | one comment