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I am more surprised that this kind of coupon trickery still pays off and the retailers are burning money on it. The way I see it, you only search for coupons o
by Rjevski 8y ago
I am more surprised that this kind of coupon trickery still pays off and the retailers are burning money on it.
The way I see it, you only search for coupons once you see a product at a retailer and you want to buy it (or even once you already have a shopping cart built up, and are on the checkout form where the coupon field is). So the retailer already acquired you as a customer, and you're ready to checkout. Most likely you'll end up checking out anyway even if you don't find any valid coupons (which is what's currently happening, since most coupons don't work anyway).
So why are retailers still paying out affiliate revenue in this case? They have the customer already. This shady affiliate doesn't bring them anything they didn't already have.
They can easily fix this by only paying out affiliate revenue for actual, legitimate affiliates, those that brought you a brand new customer. If the user already spent time browsing your website and built up a shopping cart, don't pay out affiliate revenue even if they do end up clicking on an affiliate link after.
- stirlo 8y agoOne of Australia’s largest online retailers agrees with you. https://venturebeat.com/2013/08/12/the-big-ugly-affiliate-marketing-scam/ https://venturebeat.com/2013/08/12/the-big-ugly-affiliate-ma...
- ryandrake 8y agoCouldn’t the retailer just look up when the cookie was set? If it was set during some window before the user had items in their cart, pay the affiliate. If it was set after, or long in the past, don’t pay.
- unreal37 8y agoThen it's a game of trying to find ways to not pay your affiliates. Do you want to be the retailer than gets known in the affiliate space for trying to find loopholes not to pay what they said they would? People would stop promoting your site. You might as well shut down your affiliate program if you're going to not pay your affiliates sometimes.
- ryandrake 8y agoIt doesn’t look like these guys (or most “affiliates”) are actually promoting the site or driving traffic. They’re just dipping their spoons in the existing money river.
- dazc 8y agoIt's fairly common for people to abandon the cart and come back later to complete the purchase, not always coupon related. Especially true with non-impulse purchases costing 3 figures or more.
- linuxftw 8y agoI have considered this as a possibility when it comes to shopping through affiliate portals (such as a credit card) in order to get bonus points. I usually open a private window to mitigate them doing something less the super sophisticated. In my case, I can often get the same item (or similar quality item) for same or near price, I value the extra points a retailer that participates through the affiliate program provides, and I choose that retailer.
- iamben 8y ago"Most likely you'll end up checking out anyway even if you don't find any valid coupons" I think that's quite an assumption. I have no data either way, but personally I'll rarely make a spur of the moment purchase without something pushing me over the edge. Those £60 sneakers? Pass. Those £60 sneakers with 20% off? Yeah, ok then.
- sgc 8y agoI agree. I regularly fill carts expecting to find a coupon or abandon. At the same time, just make your coupons easily accessible on your site via a google search and save yourself some money. I have noticed this is becoming a trend and use it to avoid one more chance of malware on myrandomcoupons.com.
- wolco 8y agoI did this a few hours ago. Without a coupon I moved on.
- dazc 8y agoI work with a retailer who displays a coupon on every product page and it does cut down a lot of the normal brand+coupon searches - though there are a hard core who'll always look (unsuccesfully) for a better coupon off-site.
- gnicholas 8y agoMichaels (the craft store) does this. And if you’re not getting 40% off at least one item with every purchase, you’re paying too much. Sort of like bed bath and beyond’s ubiquitous 20% off coupons, but online.
- akcreek 8y agoOne of my businesses doesn't have an affiliate program nor do we offer public coupons, yet coupon sites still have dozens of fake coupons from us along with fake usage counts on the coupons and fake reviews. Since they can't cookie stuff on us to make money they are just trying to get additional eyeballs for ads by organically ranking for anyone searching for a coupon for my brand.
- larrymcp 8y agoThanks very much: we have been completely mystified at what these sites are doing by listing fake coupons for our business too. So basically it's just black-hat SEO; I should have guessed.
- dazc 8y agoThere are valid reasons for paying an affiliate to bring existing customers back to your site. That said, affiliate networks expend a huge amount of resources into convincing retailers that coupons bring incremental sales. Reason being, it gives them an opportunity to plant cookies with every sale the retailer makes, not just those driven by a legitimate affiliate.
- im3w1l 8y agoThe way I see it, coupons are about giving a discount to people willing to jump through hoops, in order to do price discrimination.
- paulgb 8y agoPersonally, if I am checking out and I see a place for a coupon code and I can't find one, I feel like I'm overpaying. It usually wouldnt save me more than a couple of bucks but if it's something I was on the fence about buying anyway it can make me abandon my cart.
- chipotle_coyote 8y agoWell, assuming you don't get a place to enter your coupon code until checkout, that means you'd already decided that the listed price was worth it for whatever you were buying, right?
- themacguffinman 8y agoThat's not necessarily true. I think most people, including me, assume that most retailers have some kind of coupon system and don't need to see a coupon field to think about coupons. Anecdotally, there's been cases in the past where I see a product as valuable but overpriced, and a coupon makes the difference between a sale and a pass. I will go to the checkout screen with the product to try some coupons and see if they work, not having yet made the decision to proceed with the purchase.
- tomjen3 8y agoI hate the is way of arguing. You don't decided that XX dollars is fair -- you decide that XX dollars, given everything you know, is fair. So XX dollars, if that is the best price might be okay, but XX dollars, given that there is a coupon or a sale next month is not a fair price.
- soneil 8y agoI often take a sale just to the checkout, to get an accurate picture of what shipping & taxes will be added. "Shopping cart abandonment" is a specifically targeted "thing", and it's not unusual to get emails "reminding" me that I "forgot" that last crucial step of actually transacting.
- Consultant32452 8y agoI have a browser plugin that informs me if Amazon products are cheaper elsewhere and will apply coupon codes for me. So at least in my specific case a retailer might lure me away from Amazon and to their site for a particular sale.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoSome amazon affiliate must be making nice commissions on that plugin!
- Consultant32452 8y agoThey are likely an affiliate for every site they recommend. My default for online shopping has been Amazon for a while, but I'm more and more frequently being pulled to Walmart and other sites. Tools like this plugin are a big reason for that.
- techlover14159 8y agoDoes Amazon make sellers price item lower or equal to their own store fronts? This might mean that small brand owners or white labelers might not be able to offer same item on their own store front for price they offer on Amazon.
- ucaetano 8y agoSimple: price discrimination. Coupons allow you to selectively target price-sensitive customers with lower prices, resulting in better matching of your price to buyer's willingness to pay.
- donald123 8y agoThis is bold and terrible idea. Affiliate programs encourage members to bring users, no matter through coupons or blog posts or other legit means. They have no idea if a user is coming because of a coupon or other reasons, how can they exclude this type of sites? Besides, even if like you said a user is ready to buy something, there could be better coupons from rival retailers which bring the user to the site and look for the same product. Isn't this what a lot of retailers want? Using better coupons to bring users from competitors site? There are many other scenarios, without considering those and just make the decision is really bad.
- justinbaker84 8y agoMarketing pro chiming in here - this is done so the marketing departments of all these companies can claim credit for driving a ton of sales. The people who are working at these big legacy retailers in 2018 tend to not be very sophisticated about online marketing. I'm being polite with that understatement. So nobody calls out the marketing departments on this because there is so much political BS going on anyway as everybody is scratching and clawing for their piece of an ever shrinking pie. I worked in a similar situation and I wanted to stop working with these coupon sites for the obvious reasons you pointed out. I got overruled by higher ups and I later came to learn that my complaints about this practice were a career limiting move. They just want to be able to take credit for driving a ton of sales even though everybody with half a brain realizes they are not generating new sales. They are simply cannibalizing the business because the vast majority of the time these people would buy at full price anyway if their Google search never turned up a coupon.
- Reedx 8y agoThere's also brand image to consider. Constant sales or coupons affect that (and good luck dropping those once customers are used to it). Maybe it makes sense in some cases though? Vice versa for others. What's their opinion of Apple, for example? Would they operate the same way there?
- ttcbj 8y agoIsn't this a useful form of price discrimination, though? The coupons allow you to sell your products at full price to those who are price insensitive, while also allowing you to sell at a discount to price-sensitive buyers. Only the latter are willing to go to the hassle of looking up the coupon codes. My wife installed a plug-in on our family computer that looks up coupon codes for you at checkout time. But often they don't work, so I don't even bother with them. To me, that suggests that even if its 'easy' to find the coupon codes, the coupons still work as a form of price discrimination.
- manfredo 8y agoFavoring those who are price sensitive isn't necessarily benefitting those who are less wealthy (this wasn't explicitly stated, but it's often implied in praises of price discrimination, please let me know of this isn't what you meant with this comment). Wealthier people often have time to find better prices, or have others find better prices for them. Also, people with better information skills are often better at identifying the best price (and people with such skills tend to be better off in general). A poor person balancing several jobs may not have much time to research prices. On priniciple I'm usually okay with rewarding diligence and thoughtfulness, but penalising those who lack the ability to perform this diligence and thoughtfulness may not be the best thing in this case.
- grouseway 8y agoIt also generates a feeling of urgency - buy now before the coupon expires. You could say sales do the same thing, but online sales are so overused that I personally disregard them because I figure the store will have another fake sale soon anyway.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoOnline sales are not designed to get you to buy something BECAUSE there is a sale, they exist so you can feel better about paying for products you were ALREADY looking to buy. Yes, there is a little bit of a final push due to a sale but it’s not the primary reason. Source: I’m a CRO person and manipulate shopping behavior for a living.
- arbuge 8y ago> They can easily fix this by only paying out affiliate revenue for actual, legitimate affiliates, those that brought you a brand new customer. Not so easy. New customers like to shop with coupons too. There's certainly no guarantee (or, in my opinion, even a likelihood) that only awarding affiliate commission for new customers would rule out coupon purchases. I personally always scout around for discounts and coupon codes before shopping anywhere - it has nothing to do with whether it's my first purchase or not. > If the user already spent time browsing your website and built up a shopping cart, don't pay out affiliate revenue even if they do end up clicking on an affiliate link after. I think this makes more sense without the "even" word. Also, if the link was clicked on before the cart was built up, a commission would be in order.