Web Affiliate Marketing Blog

Webgains today announced the introduction of their much anticipated Voucher Code Tool which has been in development for a good couple of months. In summary their tool helps protect affiliates who have been provided with exclusive discount codes and now allows the opportunity of promoting them offline.

Why are exclusive codes available to only some affiliates?
Some merchants offer affiliates an exclusive discount code after proving their worth on a particular programme, or on past performances in similar verticals. In that respect its very similar to tiered structures, in that the more you do, the more you benefit. Other times, an affiliate will agree to take reduced level of commission in order to share the offset of the disconut code, with the merchant. This is very uncommon, and as you can imagine, isn’t ideal to any affiliate but can work in your favour depending on the initial commission structure, merchant, products available and sometimes season.

What Webgains have introduced, after months of development and discussion with affiliates, is a Voucher Tool that aims to resolves some issue that have been raised in the past year, and will further enhance the voucher sector in affiliate marketing. I am sure this will be controversial to some, and not to others, but I personally see it as bringing the Voucher Code market inline with Cashback sites and welcome this very bold move.

Their tool will provide;
•A overview of available vouchers with start & expiry dates, individual commission per voucher & all the promotional details
(now affiliates can, and should, list expiry dates for all vouchers without being requested to remove high ranking SEO pages)

•Voucher-based tracking as last referrer
(feel free to pinch or publish my codes anywhere - on you site, in forums or word of mouth)

•Product-specific voucher use & relevant commission attribution

•Reporting on voucher use for each order
(will be interesting to see what this will show)

•Offline marketing tracked & reported online based on voucher use
(presumably with a merchants agreement)

How will this affect other affiliates? How big will the implications be to cashback sites? There are still many areas that are left unanswered one of which (and I am sure will be mentioned in forum etc) are review websites and affiliates who say they provide “content”. Is it fair that AffiliateA who has written a review on ProductA and links to MerchantA may miss out to commissions if the visitor then goes and searches for a discount code?

My question is simple… is it any different to cashback sites?

Although I understand their argument, I don’t see any difference between discount and cashback sites. Either way AffiliateA may miss out on commissions despite spending massive amounts of time and effort creating content - but for some reason cashback sites were never challenged when they started appearing years ago!