Digital Direct / Sound and Vision phone number leakage

[VBA_LTD]

Tweet

Thanks Kath -- good to know that some merchants understand the issue from an affiliate's perspective and are happy to address this to our benefit.


Matt -- on a separate note, you used to display the delivery cost for the user when they clicked through to the Digital Direct site. This is now buried in the checkout process, and the user is required to enter their postcode, before a delivery charge is shown.

Given that your delivery charges are often quite high (anything up to £50), is it possible to include this information in your feed, so that the total cost (including delivery) can be displayed on price comparison sites?

Thanks

Hi Nickhx,

The delivery cost does appear prior to the customer proceeding to the checkout 50% of the time, we are currently running a split test to see if the displaying of the delivery cost prior to the checkout has any effect on conversion rates.

As for showing the delivery cost in the feed, we are already in the process of implementing this and it should hopefully be included soon.

[accelerator]

As affiliates only get paid if a sale is placed online, I feel everything should be done by the merchant to ensure a visitor from an aff link places their order online. Here are some ideas:

- Code the site so that a "help and advice" telephone number is displayed when aff link has been used. You can then provide help and advice, but ask the customer to actually place their order online.

- Code the site so that if you must have a "Buy Now" phone number, then an affiliate specific reference number can be displayed, which then gets requested by telephone staff and tracked back to attribute the sale to the affiliate.

Affiliates have seen their conversion rates drop because of the phone number implementation, so I support them removing links to you until more active steps to protect aff revenue, as per the above, are taken. We spend a lot of time and effort to get a visitor to your site, so if there is the buy now phone number it's a revenue killer for us and you can only expect us to drop merchants who aren't taking this seriously.

Rgds

[MattSweet]

You keep mentioning there is no shift in sales towards phone orders but has there been an effect on online conversion rates?

[VBA_LTD]

Hi Matt,

As I posted in the other thread on this subject -

December 2009 saw a slight increase in affiliate sales against December 2008 and saw conversions improve dramatically against the same period, which again would indicate the inclusion of the telephone numbers has had no impact on affiliate sales.

Kind regards

Matt

[MattSweet]

Thanks for that. It's just that Awin show the conversion rates to be poor compared to other programmes in the sector so I thought it was worth asking.