The emergence of the Maximising Consumer as Voucher Codes usage Surges
An interesting week for the world of voucher codes it seems. After reading a piece in the Sunday times about Mark Pearson, who has built a £30m personal fortune from his site myvouchercodes, Hitwise have just released some fascinating facts and figures about voucher code usage online - something that Internet Retailing is calling the emergence of the ‘maximising consumer’ - I quite like this as it shows consumers are not just looking for the cheapest price from often biased shopping comparison search engines but taking longer to look around.
This trend will certainly have implications on Affiliate Marketing as more cookies are dropped along a shoppers journey to the basket and adds to the debate on both de-duplication and allocation of commission.
It also rightly does point out that the market is still a little murky, due to some historical and present spammy and rather volitile methods used by some sites to acquire traffic over user experience - something I think Google will take action on at some stage.
Despite the mass of voucher codes sites in existence and I’m talking over 200 - I can see a core handful of companies taking this channel by the horns followed by a number of syndicated and white label offerings and thankfully a total clean up of this internal channel.
Also good news for our wee’ project Restaurant Vouchers though, as the report states that searches for the term have increased by 226.3% over the last 12 months.
More stories from Google News.
Agree that there seems to be an increasing understanding of how to best utilise the voucher code space, not only by consumers but also by merchants, agencies and affiliate networks, which I hope is also fuelling this trend.
I hope that the IAB’s voucher code guidelines have assisted this movement as it is definitely going to continue to be a large part of the affiliate landscape for some time. You only have to look over the pond at the ‘coupon’ sector to realise that.
It will be interesting to see how the voucher code space develops next. The holy grail would be a point of sale system that ties up with online voucher codes, enabling merchants complete visibility. It would also allow you to monetise your restaurant vouchers site Woody!
see http://richardknight.org.uk/business/retailers-throw-away-good-business-practice-just-to-use-online-functionality-37
Hi Matt/s,
It’s interesting to see the debate has finally moved on from code sites being merely a good thing or a bad thing to discussion of how best to work them into the affiliate marketing mix.
Here are Renegade Publsihing we continue to innovate and develop DiscountCodes.tv to enhance the user experience with the addition of walkthrough video tutorials to help visitors use codes.
We’ve also started putting together review style video features talking about things like courier services which again is aimed at being useful to visitors not just about short-term money making.
Merchants can now add themselves to DCTV even if they haven’t got an affiliate program free of charge and merchants running affiliate programs on any UK network can request a login to take control of their codes and offers.
I can see one way to avoid competing head on with the generic code sites is to develop code sites dedicated to individual sectors and your Restaurant Vouchers site is a good example of this.
I look forward to touching base with you guys again at the a4u Expo,
Joe Connor
It’s a growth area but like all things that grow quickly and unchecked it needs pruning back to remove the weak, soindly shoots, and leave sites with a bit more integrity.