Marks and Spencer - Christmas bonus structure - well worth a look

**Malcolm Cowley** · 06-10-04

Hi all

Marks and Spencer are putting a Christmas bonus structure in place which when you work it out means that you can nearly double your commission on at least one of the levels

Number of
sales Commission
per Month bonus
50 - 100 £100
101 - 200 £200
201 - 300 £300
301 - 400 £400
401 - 500 £500
501 - 600 £600
601 - 700 £700
701 - 800 £800
801 - 900 £900

An example of how this will work is described below:
If you generate 206 sales and £12,352.61 revenue in October your earnings
will be:

Commission: £12,352.61 x 3% = £370.56

Bonus: £300

Total Earnings: £670.56

Start Date: 6th October 2004

End Date: 21st December 2004 (FYI this is the last order date for Christmas)

People have long said the commission for Marks and Spencer was poor and I agree but with this bonus structure in place the program is much more porfitable to promote and I reckon if they see enough increase in volume as a result then they may make something more permanent ( this is just my personal observation )

If you have traffic for them but you have been holding back now is the time to come forward and prove you can do the business for them and make a strong case for them revising the commission permanently IMO

Thanks

Mal

**loquax** · 06-10-04

Is the cookie tracking properly now though - don't ever remember getting an email saying it had been fixed?

Jason

**Malcolm Cowley** · 06-10-04

Hi

The cookie is in place now - you can check cookie sales through your new cookie stamp - which is in the csv report on sales.

Ta

Mal

**loquax** · 06-10-04

Cool... any idea when their Christmas products etc will be in/available? Top sellers? Products to push? That kinda thing!

Don't ask for much me!

Jason

**Malcolm Cowley** · 06-10-04

Hi

I am sure the girls down at Wheel will be more than happy to sort out some of that info for you mate. Ill drop them a line and see what we can come up with.

A rolling top ten selling items for the datafeed would be good I reckon.

Ask away mate thats the only way we are going to make these programs better - shy bairns get nowt :-)

**sara@wheel** · 06-10-04

Hi Jason

We are hoping to have the Xmas products in the next couple of weeks. However the intial stages of the Xmas promotion will be focusing on the following product lines:

Hampers
Flowers
Wine

We will have the usual creative and a few text links. Were you just after a top 10 list of Xmas products?

Feel free to drop me an email - sara.brook@wheel.co.uk if you need anything specific to help drive sales and I'll see what I can do.

Cheers
Sara

**loquax** · 06-10-04

Hi

Are the Christmas Hampers already in your product feed?

Top 10 Xmas products would be quite useful (i have a generalised list of socks, scarves etc. on a "guess what might be a good idea as a present" basis, but any pointers would be useful).

Also do you do gift vouchers - and if yes are commissions paid on them?

Jason

**sara@wheel** · 06-10-04

not yet! I'll leave a message in teh Buy.at Forum when it is.

cheers

s

**Qui Gon Jinn** · 06-10-04

Hi Sara,

Can we come back to the cookie.

From what we understand 30% of sales take place within the session & 90% take place within 7 days from previous discussions with Wheel prior to announcement of 7 day cookie launch.

However we have not noticed this reflected in the EPC.

We have been awaiting news from Wheel circa 5th July

In theory the EPC should have trebled, but from our stats, this doesn't seem to be the case and not convinced the 7 day cookie is entirely accurate or fully functioning as we know there were techincal issues or delays from the end of M&S. If anything the epc has hardly moved or in fact decreased. A small handful of sales are showing through the cookie stamp but not at the ratio previosuly outlined.

I have communicated intermittently via email or msn this with your agency but as of yet not had any definitive reply or answer. Which has now been 3 months, which started to become a little tedious.

EPC's

May 3.95
June 4.21
July @4.00
Aug 2.83
Sept 4.36

Even looking at the network trend through CJ, albeit we get a better EPC via Buy.at, the inference suggests from the trend graph that maybe the 7 day cookie may not be functioning as it should or other tracking has gone array. If anything it has gone marginally down. (Note: The graph is in $ so divide by about 1.8)

It just doesn't seem right and my decison on M&S leading up to xmas hinges on this.

**Rich** · 06-10-04

Since buy.at now have the cookie time in the csv version of the daily breakdown report, maybe you should have a look at that and see what number of non-session sales you're getting (if you haven't already). I did have a look, but I've only had 8 sales from 5780 clicks this year so haven't got enough data!

**Mogga** · 06-10-04

Looks like all my M&S sales occur same day.

**Malcolm Cowley** · 06-10-04

Hi

I'm at home at the moment but when I get in tomorrow ill post the % of non cookie sales across the network this should give a clearer picture.

**Malcolm Cowley** · 06-10-04

Rich ill pick up your conversion separately as I know you have good traffic and that conversion is too bizarre for words , cookie issues or not - lets see if we can get to the bottom of it tomorrow if your up for it.

**Qui Gon Jinn** · 06-10-04

Hi Rich,

Yes I did mate. And fortunately have quite a bit of data to work on.

From August stats 12.63% of sales took place after the session, which doesn't correlate with the 66% it's assumedly supposed to be. i.e. ratio of session sales to outside session sales 1:2

From July Stats it is only 7.3%

n.b. There was no tracking on the probably very late evening on the 5th until late morning on the 8th.

From September stats it is 13.59%

If 2/3rds of sales are meant to be outside the session (or twice many sales) then epc should be trebled and these figures should read 66%.

Therefore i can only assume either 7 day cookie and / or session is not fully functional. Noting this is based on figures we were infromed and that EPC has gone down since the 7 day cookie implementation.

**Rich** · 06-10-04

To be honest my M&S traffic is from a site I just threw lots of product feeds at, so I wouldn't be too surprised if the quality wasn't that great, though I was hoping it would be a bit better.