New Affiliate

Lawrence

Just to reiterate from the site updates, there is a new affiliate available to be enabled on your store http://www.brickowl.com/mystore/settings/affiliate_settings . Affiliates are an excellent way of driving extra traffic to your storefront, I hope it will be as successful as Rebrickable and WallofBricks has been for many stores on Brick Owl.

DagsBricks

Lovin' the affiliate options, Lawrence!

unbrickable

Nice Lawrence !! I brought me already multiple sale !

theHellmouth

Seems that the collectible minifigs are fig only and not the whole set ... ? I have them for sale here at Brickowl as set but they are not shown on Swapfig, my others figs are.

SilentMode

Swapfig is an affiliate?! This is the best news ever, it's been a long time coming. \:D/

I'd hate to be the guy that runs it though, he's been working flat out over the last couple of months.

Anyway I let him know about the missing items from the search results, he says he's found the problem and will update the site in a few minutes.

bluedragon

@Lawrence

I enabled the new Swapfig affiliate and on Aug 12 I visited the website and clicked through to be directed to BO as if I was placing an order just to try it out.

Today, I placed an order in my own store using the wishlist feature and noticed that Swapfig was listed as an affiliate used for this order. I did not visit the Swapfig website since Aug 12. Is this the normal behavior of the affiliate referral? This would be a clear case of an order that can't be attributed to an external referral. I think the time between the referral and the order must be set to a much narrower interval.

Lawrence

It is standard practice to have affiliate cookies last for a reasonable amount of time, I think we do it for a week but I'm not certain of that. In your case, of course, that is a clear case of an order that wasn't solely down to the affiliate, but in your case you are not a normal customer. A standard use case might be that a customer clicks through from an affiliate, takes a look around, comes back a few days later to fill their cart, and then maybe another few days for them to checkout, and it wouldn't be fair to end the affiliate cookie after a day for example.

bluedragon

Thanks

alltrightbricks

I understand the need for cookies to stay around for a short time, in case the buyer doesn't checkout right away.
But I have been thinking this whole thing through a bit. I would hate for a buyer to build a cart--say $100 in my store, and then find a fig they are also looking for on swapfig and go into my store and add it to their cart and checkout a couple days later after adding yet more parts. I would then pay a 4% fee on the entire order to swapfig. This is a scenario I had not really considered until now. I figured all of the orders coming through the site would be for figs and some related accessories.

Also as a side note, what happens if a buyer come to your store through rebrickable or wallofbricks, start a cart, then go to swapfig and find a figure they want and add it to their cart and then check out? Is it possible end up owing referral fees to two sources on one order?

I'm still thinking things over, but I have decided not to continue using the swapfig referral for the time being. The 4% is in my opinion really high. If their fees only applied to the items advertised on their site, and all other items in an order were exempt from the fee, I would then reconsider.

Katie

OvertheBrick

Are we clearing up the cookie right after checkout ? I have a feeling this is not the case and I think some customers come back right to BO after their first purchase and we are rewarding the affiliates when really we should be rewarding ourselves for making the customers happy

@Lawrence I do have a suspicion the cookie is longer than a week. How can we check this ?

I do agree with @alltrightbricks if we could apply the fee to items the affiliate is selling that would justify the higher premiums (note that I have yet to get an order reffered from Swapfig )

Lawrence

The cookie lasts a week, it can be overwritten, but it can only store one value, an order can never be attributed to multiple sources, only ever the most recent source, as long as that source was within seven days. The cookie is not removed if an order is placed, if a customer chooses to make multiple orders after coming from a affiliate source, I think it is fair that the source gets credited.

Ultimately it's a business decision you need to make for your store as to whether you want to receive orders the affiliate or not. Personally I feel the current setup strikes a balance of fairness to both affiliates and stores.