Sears PartsDirect, the premier provider of repair parts and accessories for all major brand appliances, electronics, and garden equipment, and more, has launched a new affiliate program with global performance network, buy.at. As a division of the Sears Home Services brand, Sears PartsDirect offers an extensive online product collection of more than 7million parts and accessories from 450 manufacturers including nationally recognized brands such as Crafstman, GE, Kenmore, Kitchenaid, Maytag, and Whirlpool. According to Affstat, brand awareness is the most important factor for 34% of US affiliates when choosing an advertiser to promote.

With an average order value of $48.00, a live product feed with over 200,000 products, and nationwide shipping available to anywhere in the US, the Sears PartsDirect program provides affiliates with a wealth of opportunities to maximize exposure, drive targeted traffic and increase revenues. buy.at provides unrivalled tools and technology, a robust reporting suite to measure performance and ROI, coupled with an award winning team including 2012 Pinnacle award winner, Kim Salvino. (more…)

Leading performance marketing agency, Affiliate Traction has joined forces with global affiliate network, buy.at to offer strategic affiliate marketing solutions for advertisers. Through the partnership, high profile brands including Sketchers, Spencer’s Gifts, Mattel Shop, SOCCER.com and Precious Moments™ are now available to buy.at affiliates. Bringing together market-leading tools and technology, as well as unrivalled levels of account management, the agency and network will collaborate to maximize online presence and ROI for clients.

With over a decade of industry experience and through long-term relationships directly with top internet retailers, many of which fall within the Internet Retailer Top 500, Affiliate Traction and buy.at provide online publishers with a range of opportunities through the performance channel. buy.at’s global reach and proprietary tools coupled with Affiliate Traction’s all-inclusive affiliate management services will focus on delivering results, building long-term strategic partnerships with key publishers, and introducing new, relevant niche sites within specific verticals for advertisers to engage with. (more…)

Merchant ABCs hosts Deborah Carney, Vinny O’Hare and Amy Ely joined Kim Salvino of buy.at and Liz Fogg of Team Loxly to answer a fundamental question for affiliate managers: What key steps should I take when launching (or relaunching) an affiliate program?

Key Steps Include:

Review the affiliate list – check your program’s placement on the site, understand how they’re promoting your program (and make sure they’re compliant with your PPC policy), ask industry contacts about their reputation, consult your network or OPM, review forums and search online for any positive or negative feedback about the affiliate

Evaluate the program terms – make sure you have program-specific terms in addition to network terms, ensure they’re clear and consistent, outline search policies on using brand name in the display URL, misspellings, brand + term bidding, and consider including terms for coupon affiliates to set expectations

Assess the creative – include a wide variety of fresh text link and banner creative in IAB standard sizes, create deep text links (deep linking should be a requirement!!), offer a well categorized, regularly updated data feed and provide content for affiliates to use on their site

Understand the competitive landscape – is your commission structure, cookie length, conversion rate and creative suite competitive?

Develop a communication plan – send out an introductory newsletter to affiliates and an announcement post in forums and social media, consider including a survey to ask what they need, determine when you’ll send newsletters and if you’ll echo communications through social media, provide your full contact details and be approachable, genuine, and responsive to affiliates

Walk through the affiliate’s shoes – sign up to the program an affiliate, identify how long it takes for network approval, understand the process for pulling creative, viewing reports, and more so you can identify pain points that may deter affiliates and consumers

Test, test, test – test your shopping cart in all major browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome), complete a test purchase to ensure tracking and reporting are working as expected, confirm that affiliate transactions across different networks track properly

Download the full podcast here or click here to simply open the podcast in a new window.

Your brand is a hit in your home country and your website is starting to draw sales from across the pond, proving there is an interest in your product range. You add on shipping costs for your new market and display the price of your products with the local currency text identifier (USD/GBP). Traffic is increasing off the back of the SEO you’ve implemented and you’ve launched a PPC campaign, but conversion rates remain stubbornly low.

Here are 10 basic steps, and one golden rule, to optimize the conversion rates of your new territory traffic. (more…)

A research study conducted by the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) reported that the online fashion retail industry demonstrated exponential growth – an astonishing 2,000% – from 2001 to 2011. Additionally, Forrester published statistics indicating that US online retail sales grew 12.6% in 2010 to reach $176.2 billion, with the ecommerce market expected to reach $278.9 billion in 2015. As more consumers shop online, performance marketing is becoming an increasingly attractive channel for fashion advertisers, where a broad range of online partnership opportunities exist, each providing clear and measureable results.

Global affiliate network, buy.at has seen a steady increase in the number of fashion retailers integrating affiliate campaigns into their online marketing strategies, with an aim to increase brand awareness, acquire new customers, and generate additional revenue. These include well-known global brands such as Accessorize, Lindsay Phillips, and T.M. Lewin. There are several factors that continue to drive double-digit growth for clothing retailers, including the emergence of new online shopping models such as flash sales and group-buying websites, both of which have displayed rapid growth and continue to drive consumer interest. (more…)

This week saw another successful Affiliate Summit conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Beginning on January 8th, Caesars Palace played host to the 19th summit where for the first time, more than 5000 digital marketing professionals gathered together for a jam-packed three days of informative industry presentations, extensive networking, and of course, the infamous summit parties with old friends within the industry.

Affiliates, agencies, vendors, advertisers, and networks of all shapes and sizes were in attendance, hoping to forge new business relationships within the performance marketing channel. Several of our advertisers spent time at the buy.at booth –meeting and mingling with existing partners and potential prospects.

Here’s a list of the advertisers who joined us:

Samir El-Alami (Badoo)
Erica Barry (VA Mortgage)
Greg Hoffman (SubscriptionAgent.com)
John Lobrutto (TripAlertz)
Alicia Iveson, Ketan Thanki & Elizabeth Chung (British Airways)
Jen Ward (myOptumHealth Store)
Heather Blackburn (Girly Checks)
Jeannette Saliba (BargainStation.com)

We also hosted another fun and engaging ‘Twitter-a-Winner’ contest for all publishers, with a range of fantastic prizes from several brands including CafePress, Designers Guild, Ghirardelli, Girly Checks, Veer, Whittard of Chelsea, Goldstar, TripAlertz, Value Pet Supplies and the grand prize of a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 from BargainStation.com.

The definitive highlight of the show was on Tuesday the 10th when our very own Head of Publishers, Kim Salvino was awarded the prestigious Pinnacle Award for Affiliate Manager of the Year. After being nominated for three consecutive years, Kim finally took home the well-deserved trophy and we couldn’t be more excited and proud. We’ll be doing a detailed interview with Kim on the blog next week so make sure to check it out.

Thank you to everyone who made an effort to speak with us at the conference and to all of the buy.at team for another exceptional affiliate summit. Looking forward to ASE 2012 in New York.

Photos from ASW2012 can be seen here.

Lisa Chaikin
PR Manager – UK & US

Week Nine – Let’s go sale-ing

No rest for the wicked. It’s “the holidays” but in this industry, you’re lucky to get any real holiday at this time of year at all. Christmas is over for another year but in the blink of an eye is mega sale time! If you’re stuck working between Christmas and New Year to make the most of the sales peak, we have a competition just for you. Send us a screen shot of your post-Christmas sales promotions and we will enter you into a prize draw to win a £100/$150 bonus for working so hard over the festive season. Email an image of your site featuring any post-Christmas or sales promotions to competitions@digitalwindow.com to be in with a chance of some extra cash! Don’t forget to confirm you affiliate ID or handle in your email.

Terms and Conditions

• Entrants must send an image of an affiliate site they own/maintain featuring post-Christmas/sales content to competitions@digitalwindow.com between 09:00 23/12/11 and 23:59 02/01/12 to be counted
• There will be one publisher account drawn as the winner
• The winner must be aged 16 or over
• There is no alternative prize
• The competition is not open to any employees of Digital Window
• The judges’ decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into
• Digital Window accepts no responsibility for any technical factors that may affect the receiving of entries via email or twitter. Only answers that successfully reach our mail server by the cut off time will be counted
• The £100/$150 prize will be credited to the affiliate account quoted in the competition entry
• All US, federal, state and local and Canadian federal, provincial, and municipal laws and regulations apply

A chance to win every week!

This year there are lots of presents under our tree that we’ll be giving away across the next ten weeks; from hampers to gadgets, entertainment goodies to this year’s hottest toys. Each week we’ll set you a new task to complete for entry into our prize draw.

We’ll also be running fun little games for ad hoc gifts, so make sure you are following our activities on Twitter and TheHub.

Week Seven – Secret Santa

At Affiliate Window and buy.at we’re all generous souls, but there’s one person who’s really getting into the spirit this year…our very own secret Santa! Guess who has been at the milk and cookies and you could win a whole haul of gifts!

We’ve narrowed it down to five unusual suspects and we’re sure that one of them has been taking on St Nick at his own game. To be in with a chance on winning the contents of our secret Santa’s sack, all you need to do is guess who is the behind the fluffy white beard.

Our secret Santa caught on camera:

The suspects
~ Click on the person you think is our Santa to enter this week’s draw! ~

Name: Louise Read
Job Title: Events Coordinator
Years in the industry: 2
Favourite reindeer: Prancer
Top of your Christmas wish list: Pandora charm bracelet

Name: Owen Hewiston
Job Title: Client Strategist
Years in the industry: 5
Favourite reindeer: Vixen, obviously
Top of your Christmas wish list: Peace on earth and goodwill to all!

Name: Morgan Foland
Job Title: Account Executive, buy.at US
Years in the industry: 1
Favourite reindeer: Rudolph
Top of your Christmas wish list: Clothes!

Name: Matt Swan
Job Title: Client Strategist
Years in the industry: 5
Favourite reindeer: Cupid
Top of your Christmas wish list: Maximum points for Tottenham over the Christmas period.

Name: Colleen Bulfin
Job Title: Fashion Specialist
Years in the industry: 2
Favourite reindeer: Dancer
Top of your Christmas wish list: These Alaia beauties.

More about the prize

Inside Santa’s sack is:
Fijit Friends
Sesame Street Ltes Rock Elmo
Star Wars Ultimate Force Tech Lightsaber
Zumba Fitness Workout
Remote Control Gyro Helicopter with Camera

Terms and Conditions
• You must click on the image of the correct Affiliate Window and buy.at employee to access the competition entry page
• All affiliate account numbers and handles submitted through our competition page before 23:59 Sunday 18th December gain one entry into the prize draw
• There will be one affiliate account drawn as the winner
• The winner must be aged 16 or over
• There is no alternative prize
• The competition is not open to any employees of Digital Window
• The judges’ decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into
• Prize is subject to availability and is non transferable
• Delivery of prize will be arranged after the winner has been contacted and confirmed their address
• All US, federal, state and local and Canadian federal, provincial, and municipal laws and regulations apply

Week Five – Adventuly

Hopefully you’re getting the hang of searching for our Christmas presents because this week, we’ve hidden another one for you to find. Inside is this week’s prize, another must-have gadget to help Christmas come early, the BLACKBERRY PlayBook Tablet PC!

The image of a Christmas present in our brand colours (orange & red) is lurking somewhere in TheHub itself to be sought out by our intrepid publishers. When it is discovered, you are one click away from a chance to win. The gift image you are looking for could be anywhere on this site – apart from on this page! It will appear on the morning of Tuesday 29^th November and can click on it to enter your ID/handle into this week’s prize draw until 4^th December. (more…)

GoldenCAN, a premier data feed solution provider, is pleased to announce the introduction of buy.at advertisers to their expanding catalog of products. Enabling affiliates to easily build a robust online store using only one line of HTML code, GoldenCAN’s inclusion of buy.at’s feed data also adds to the diversity of items available through their suite of affiliate tools. The collaboration of GoldenCAN’s leading technology and buy.at’s progressive global performance marketing network brings exceptional value, variety, and simplicity for affiliates.

GoldenCAN offers the most comprehensive data feed integration tools recognized by affiliate managers across the world. These include Store Integration™ Coupon Integration™ and Search Integration™ options that affiliates can use to showcase a variety of products in an attractive storefront style, to feature coupons, and to create a search solution across their site for multiple advertisers. (more…)