R.O.EYE Blog

By Ben Friedman, Recruitment Executive R.O.EYE

Valentines Day is definitely one of the biggest times for most retail industries with everyone trying to find the perfect gift for their loved ones, but does this have a big impact on affiliate sales? And if so what kind of impact?

At R.O.EYE we run a large retail brands programme which sells a wide variety of gifts for both men and women, so we expected a large amount of sales over the Valentines period.

Towards the end of January sales started to pick up and this growth continued to build all through the start of the February.

As we approached the big day we expected the sales to fall a few days before, to allow for postage. This is what we saw at Christmas and it’s what we are used to seeing before events that involve gift buying. But the sales didn’t stop. Sales actually increased on the day before Valentines Day to their highest level in that period. How does this make sense?

My personal view is that couples may have been shopping for their gifts in the high streets and then deciding to go home and buy online, possibly so that they can get up to 10% cash back on their Presents. If this is the case would some affiliate programmes benefit from being more closely related to what is happening on the high street? I mean this in terms of the merchants seeing the programmes not solely as an online medium of sales, but as a more important part of their overall marketing strategy with better links with the high street stores selling their products.

Which leads me to a new question, should more High Street stores have the means for tracking affiliate sales? Let’s flip this on its head. For example, if an affiliate pre-sells a product on their site, like and item of clothing and the customer then buys it in the high street store the affiliate receives no commission. Would a scheme involving printing off vouchers for use in store, with affiliate specific codes mean that online sales could be tracked on the high street? Would this be a good thing? Where does this leave last click now??

I know I have asked a lot more questions than I have answered, but it is Friday morning. Please feel free to comment if you have the answers to my questions or any views on anything.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Online Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.