Zavvi Not So Savvy

[Qui Gon Jinn]

0% products creeping in. i wonder which other merchants will follow on Wi Fit & Mario Kart.

The email was received on the 30th April, but the email says it took effect 5 days earlier. This really isn't on

zavvi.co.uk regret that from 25th April onwards they will no longer be able to pay commissions on the following products:

Mario Kart - Wii
GTA IV - XBOX 360 & PS3
GTA IV Special Editions - XBOX 360 & PS3
Wii Fit
Wii Consoles
And from 1st of May 2008 any console bundles including any of the aforementioned excluded products.

zavvi.co.uk have been reluctantly forced to take this step due to extremely low availability of these products.

Poppycock

[Mike_Scott]

'zavvi.co.uk have been reluctantly forced to take this step due to extremely low availability of these products.'

That last line makes me laff

Just ditch them

[Bud]

Along with that they have failed to respond to a quite reasonable (I think) request from shopwindow users to remove some VERY Adult movies from their feed.

Zavvi have now been dropped from my stores.

- No respect for affiliates -

[Shane]

"zavvi.co.uk have been reluctantly forced to take this step due to extremely low availability of these products"

yup that line translates as .. we can't get that many so we aim to make as much profit of those few that we can so we aren't willing to pay any commission on them..

[Rich]

Yeah, they are getting less and less chance of being included in a site I'm slowly setting up. I just don't get the reason why it affects commission. They either mean general availability to customers is low, so they are saying 'sod off and sell the less requested stuff' or availability to them is low, but they wouldn't be paying out commission anyway if they don't have it to sell.

[drivetowin]

Just to put a different spin on it (and I don't work with Zavvi so don't know whether this is their angle but it is an angle I heard from another retailer before Christmas when Wii were in the same position) -

Affiliates can drive a considerable volume of sales - now normally for retailers this is a good thing, unless items are in really short supply - so if blue widgets for example are in short supply but high demand, as a retailer you don't want hundreds of visitors to your website looking for blue widgets if you only actually have five blue widgets to sell, as the end result is you get lots of disappointed visitors who not only do not buy a blue widget from you but think you are always out of stock of everything so never come back - so in those instances it is better not to have the visitor come to your site in the first place. Merchants cannot directly control what affiliates advertise so they use the only method they can, set the commission on those items to zero, to discourage affiliates from promoting those items. Now, ok, it's a risky strategy, as you can end up alienating affiliates altogether, but it's a question of which is worse, lots of disappointed potential customers or a few disgruntled affiliates.

I'm not saying it's a viewpoint I totally agree with, but thought it was worth presenting the argument as it was presented to me.

[Darren M]

Quite a few of my visitors have been asking me why I don't list Zavvi on a site I have with Wii Fit listings. Obviously at 0% commission there's no point in me listing them. A few of these people have gone back to Google and searched for Zavvi + Wii Fit, seen a PPC ad for zavvidirect.com and believing this site to be linked with Zavvi, have placed an order with them.

I'm not sure if zavvidirect is a scam site or not, but they're definitely trading off the back of the Zavvi brand. The PPC ad isn't there anymore, but I'm sure they've managed to intercept a huge number of people looking to buy from Zavvi.

If Zavvi paid commission on this product, they would have a listing on all of the key affiliate sites and most of these people would have been sent to the correct site, whether they had stock or not.