215 New Posts Today

[Gary-AvantLink]

Hello Everyone,

We are pleased to announce the addition of 800-Ski-Shop.com to AvantLink! 800-Ski-Shop.com is part of the Massey's Professional Outfitters suite of stores, offering high-end ski and snowboard gear from top brands like Salomon, Burton, Ride, Volkl, Tecnica, K2 and more. This is the second in a series of four announcements today that will feature focused retail sites offering exceptional terms and support for their Affiliates.

This is Massey's alpine-only specialty site and like the others, it's engineered for easy browsing and high conversion. As we mentioned already today in the MasseysOutfitters.com launch thread, these programs have unique terms in place in order to demonstrate their committment to Affiliates. Here's the big news:

800-Ski-Shop.com will not reverse transactions on standard returns & enjoy a 365 day cookie life from each click!

Highlights of promoting the 800-Ski-Shop.com program include:

• Sale reversals on fraud orders only
• 365 day cookie duration
• Commission payout of 8%, with incentives
• Store wide discount/coupon codes available
• Average order size of $200 (winter)
• Custom artwork available on request

If you're already an AvantLink Affiliate, you can sign-up for this program by following these steps:

• Login to your Affiliate account at AvantLink.com
• Select 'Merchants' from the main menu
• Locate '800-Ski-Shop.com' in the merchant list
• Click to their detail page and 'Apply to this Program'

If you're interested in applying to the AvantLink network and this program, please use the following URL: https://www.avantlink.com/affiliate_app.php

Let us know what we can do to help you get started. Feel free to contact anyone at AvantLink or the 800-Ski-Shop.com AM Brent Carey, bcarey/at/coloradowebsolutions.com.

Blog Post: 800-Ski-Shop.com is now live in AvantLink

Sincerely,

Gary & AvantLink

[AlpineZone]

I added MasseysOutfitters.com as a merchant, but opted not to add their subsidiary, 800-Ski-Shop.com. With a domain/site name like that I have to imagine many phone orders take place. Aside from the Avantlink ID appearing in the URL, there is no way to identify the affiliate as the referrer to get credit for the sale. Backcountry, for example, lists the affiliate ID right at the bottom of their site pages. Are the folks taking phone orders for 800-Ski-Shop.com instructed to request the Avantlink ID from the URL?

I've already had one BCO order that went through Live Chat not get credited to me. I have to imagine this happens a lot without getting caught.

[mike.massey]

Hey Alpine Zone... you've got an awesome point. We do always try to get customers to complete the sale in their session, and offer liveperson chat to assist. But, sometimes we do have to complete a sale over the phone (about 3-5% of sales).

So, to help diminish the chances that you get burned, we are going to work with Avant next week to try to develop a process where our staff can collect the affiliate ID from the customer's product page. We will then enter the link on the SUBMIT ORDER page to fire in the confirmation page pixel.

The issue isn't whether we want to do it, but we don't easily have access to Affiliate ID's after the customer has browsed our site for a while. We'll have to figure out a way to get this data from Avant's entry cookie.

But we are going to see it through.

Your site is awesome... and we would love to have you as an affiliate.

I will say this. If you show me a sale that came from your site (like the BC one) that didn't go through normal checkout, I will personally pay you double the commission.

In the meantime, do consider this...

1) If you set a cookie, a sale on any of our domains will pay.
2) We generate A LOT of traffic from incoming Buy Button links (IE Spyder Skiwear and soon Patagonia)
3) If you set a cookie, it will last for 365 and you will get paid a year from now, even on a click through from Patagonia or Spyder.

I personally think there is about a 10x greater chance of you getting paid b/c you set a cookie and that shopper returned from another traffic source (P2P link, DOTOMI, Paid Search)... than you missing a sale to a phone order. It really is a VERY small percentage of sales.

BUT! I get it. I will do EVERYTHING I can to set our site up to get you paid. If we screw it up, I guarantee... I will make it right.

Mike

[AlpineZone]

Now, you see? This is exactly why I love Avantlink. Quality merchants + quality affiliates = quality network! Everybody I've dealt with via Avantlink thus far has been a stand-up guy. Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Mike.

Again, I do list MasseysOutfitters products on my site. It seems the subsidiary sites are products from the same catalog, and in an effort to minimize duplicate content penalties from the SEs on my site, I'm going to just start with MasseysOutfitters for now, so I am already an affiliate. In fact, I'm actively promoting the latest 10% off promo code.

Obviously, the point of calling the "sub-site" 800-Ski-Shop.com is to create a brand by which folks can easily contact you by phone so I'd imagine the phone orders would be higher than your typical online merchant. Nevertheless, if you can come up with some sort of mechanism to clearly list an affiliate ID, perhaps near the phone number, I'd consider including it.

Thanks again for the detailed reply.

[mike.massey]

I do (easily) see your point.

Here's the reasoning on the "sub-sites".

We find that offering "shallower" product selection that is more specifically focused on a specific demographic or merchandise category generate significantly higher click-throughs.

For example... endless.com is not abundantly, obviously part of amazon. The micro, niche site's merchandise could easily be handled by Amazon... but they know keeping it separate allows them to tweak their site to a core demo.

Also, shoppers (me for example) don't want to go to a site with tons of unrelated products. If I'm looking for shoes, I don't want to be barraged with offers for Harry Potter books or a cordless drill.

The same reason for our sub-sites.

We feel that we are listening to demographics when we present a "tighter" selection of our larger catalog on a sub-site. Do skiers want a bunch of beta about climbing gear? NO! When they search for "Jackets", do you think they expect to see life jackets? They want Ski and Snowboard specific results. Burton, Spyder, Nils, Orage.

We can control that on our micro (sub) sites.

Teens and College kids click on sandal ads for "The Flip Flopper" about 3 times more frequently than MasseysOutfitters.com ads.

People searching for "Spyder Jackets" will click 800-SKI-SHOP.com about 5 times more frequently than Massey's.

Those click through rates also help us keep our Paid Search costs low (high relevancy in Paid Search), and ultimately advertise more.

My point is;
800-SKI-SHOP.com is far more likely to get a click when someone is searching for alpine gear than MasseysOutfitters.com. AND when they get to the site, the streamlined, demographic specific content will help close sales at a higher conversion rate.

Anyway... sorry to go on and on....

I'm really excited to have you on board as an affiliate.

I really will bend over backwards to make sure your happy with us. But, if you ever feel that something isn't right... contact me directly at mike.massey ~at~ masseys.net.

Thanks!

Oh, and watch for us to fix the affiliate tracking on phone orders. We will.

[AlpineZone]

Gotcha, Mike. Backcountry took the same approach with it's sub-sites, Tramdock, Dogfunk, et. al. I'm still curious whether listing all, as well as Massey's would result in duplicate content penalty.

[Gary-AvantLink]

AZ, One thing you could do is segment your datafeed client subscriptions to feature the most relevant categories. So for example, with 800-SKI-SHOP you could use the Ski/Snowboard categories only. This way you won't have the entire Massey's catalog displayed through each store's feed subscription..

Just a thought my friend..

[AlpineZone]

Originally Posted by Gary-AvantLink

AZ, One thing you could do is segment your datafeed client subscriptions to feature the most relevant categories. So for example, with 800-SKI-SHOP you could use the Ski/Snowboard categories only. This way you won't have the entire Massey's catalog displayed through each store's feed subscription..

Just a thought my friend..

Oh yeah, that's a good point. I tend to just set up the datafeed with the entire catalog, but maybe I should work towards paring them down a bit...

[mike.massey]

I'm not sure about the duplicate penalty. Just not in my realm....!

I do suspect that if you could present 8SS as 'the' vendor for alpine, you'll probably get better clickthrough.

That site also has a higher Page Rank ... (We just had to switch the Masseys domain b/c of Masseys.com)... (we'd be happy to send you a link if you'd like).

To be honest, I appreciate anything you do.

I don't want you to think I'm hammering you on this 8SS issue... I just wanted to address these issues now, so the answers are "out there".

Let me know if we can help you at all... art, search box, etc...

[AlpineZone]

Originally Posted by mike.massey

I don't want you to think I'm hammering you on this 8SS issue... I just wanted to address these issues now, so the answers are "out there".

I don't get the impression at all. A candid discussion like this is good.

[mike.massey]

Great! ... well I'll be sure to stick to what I know... (my business) and completely avoid telling you how to do yours!

Mike

[mike.massey]

just a quick heads up for our 800-SKI-SHOP coupon-oriented affiliates. we just put up a ton of fresh (good) coupons into avantlink. these are converting very well in CJ. 10-20%. k2, spyder, volkl, salomon...