A message to all Affiliates of the forum please read!!!

[perfiliate]

I know that a lot of affiliates are still confused by buy.at as an affiliate network as we also run the buy.at shops for Charity's, Schools , Sports clubs and Individuals.

I thought it wise to let you all know a bit more of what we are about from your point of view.

We do have a lot of active (online affiliates) as we term them, namely people like yourselves who run their own websites but there are some of you yet to try us and I believe this will help you to comprehend what we can do for you.

We are soon to have some very exciting new merchants which will be unique to buy.at so its worth while clearing up any misconceptions about our network now before they are integrated.

You may already be a member of some of the affiliate networks but not
yet buy.at/ so what is buy.at/ all about.

Buy.at/ is run by Perfiliate Technologies, a company which grew from
rename.com (an online redirection business). Rename.com developed its
own in-house affiliate programme which was then adopted by several other
retailers and eventually grew into buy.at/.

At its heart buy.at/ is an affiliate network with all of the features
you may be accustomed to from the other online networks. Any one is free
to join the buy.at/ network either as a simple affiliate of one or more
of the retailers or as a webshop owner.

If you want to join a single retailer programme e.g. Oddbins wines,
complete the form at signup.oddbins.at. It is at this point.
During the signup process you have to choose the address you wish to
promote. This is the first major difference between buy.at/ and the
other networks. Buy.at/uses Austrian domains to give short affiliate
addresses which do not look like affiliate links (giving all the
increased click through and other benefits of cloaked links but without
having to actually cloak anything). For instance, if you had the site
onlinediscounts.co.uk you may choose the address of
oddbins.at/onlinediscounts. If you log in to the buy.at/
programme management area you will be able to obtain the usual array of
banners and text links to promote the programme. There may also be
posters for the programme which you can print out (as buy.at/ uses
human-readable affiliate links, they can be advertised offline as well
as on) as well as instructions for deep linking.

Once you are an affiliate of one retailer, you can easily join other
programmes from the programme management area of buy.at/

If you wish to sign up to a number of retailers in one go, you can sign
up for a buy.at/webshop. This time the address will be e.g.
buy.at/onlinediscounts. This webshop will already contain a
number of retailers so can be promoted directly or you can promote the
retailers individually as each one has their own web address (such as
read.at/onlinediscounts for Blackwell's books).

Do not be put off by the buy.at/ website which is fairly targeted
towards charities and sports clubs etc. These groups are not as
Internet-savvy as online affiliates so need the extra hand-holding which
is offered on the site. The programme management area is also
deliberately simplified for their benefit but as an online affiliate,
all of the features you need are there.

I hope this clears up buy.at if you have any other questions then please e mail me

malcolm.cowley@perfiliate.com

We want to work with the people of this forum to enable us all to grow. In time buy.at will attract more unique merchants to affiliate marketing due to the added cause angle we posses so creating more revenue opportunities for (online affiliates) in the process.

All comments welcomed

[davthp]

I don't understand a word of that.

[Aquanuke]

lol - Jf keeps metioning 'Perlaffiliate' whats Perlaffiliate?

I did ask but had no idea what you was talking about.. do they have a website?

Whats an .at domain btw?

[freebieholics]

LOL

[perfiliate]

Ok folks,

We thought this post might make things a little clearer but see we may have confused people more lol so ill try and make it a little more understandable.

If buy.at has a merchant which you want to link to individually then you can sign up as an affiliate. If you go to our home page there is a link in the bottom left hand corner which says affiliates.

Its a small link as the page has been designed mainly with Good Causes in mind who are signing up for the buy.at shops we run alongside traditional affiliate activities.

Now say you want to link to Oddbins. Ill use freebieholics as an example. You all know his site freebieholics. If Carl wanted to put a text link to Oddbins on his site after signing up as an affiliate he would simply put :

oddbins.at/freebieholics

This would track all sales to oddbins from freebieholics the same way tracking code from cj or tradedoubler would , but as you can see its a lot easier to make your links no flicking between pages cutting and pasting you just have the merchant with .at at the end and / your site and your done.

.at is an austrian extension like .com or .co.uk it has no disadvantages for your sites.

I hope this makes things a little clearer. All we are trying to say is buy.at is easy for you to use and if we get some unique
merchants on board then it would be good if they have a lot of super affiliates who want to sign them up through us.

It would be a shame if people were put off because they didnt know how easy it was.

AS always any further comments would be useful to assess if we need to break this down more for you. Dont be shy about saying you still havnt got a clue what we are on about as you will most certainly not be the only one.

Kind Regards

Malcolm

[ShowYouLoveThem]

Would it not be worth your while to make a site that is geared towards affiliates, say using the perfiliate domain?

Now that I've joined (mainly in the hope of you getting Dabs) I can see how your system works and how it can work for my site. Having said that, I had visited the site a few times before and had been put of from applying by the site contents.

Rich

[perfiliate]

Yes it would be good to have both but its just a little impractical for us to do this.

We push the causes stuff heavily as that is ultimately are main area for growth. There are over 180 000 charities and double that for sports clubs and schools in this country and theres no reason why they all should not have buy.at shops. With this in mind the home page is set up to reflect the nature of our proposition to them rather than to you. To be honest they need a lot of handholding as this kind of proposal is unique to a lot of them.

Thats why this forum is so good as it allows more thorough explanations of what we can achieve for online affiliates without having to re vamp the site to much.

Having said this we are still working on a more user friendly logged in area for online affiliates.

Im glad you have joined and Im sure Dabs will be happy to have you on board too when they intergrate their code.

Our site is basic again for the causes benefit. The technology means you can take advantage of the attraction of the cause stuff to merchants who may not really be that fussed on affiliate marketing.


I think from an affiliates point of veiw the two main points are that the tracking works and that we pay on time. You can have all the whistles and bells you want but unltimately these have to come first.

As far as I know we are good on both counts. As we go along we will add more whistles and bells.

Question and answer sessions like this are very useful so the more queries the better really

[ShowYouLoveThem]

I meant just a simple site that said 'we do affiliate marketting' and a sign up form that then logs you into the normal buy.at site.

You could then promote this to 'normal' affiliates on a separate domain and sheild them from any confusion regarding the charities side of your market. All the backend system would be the same, just the sign up page would be different.

If you have a look at what you see on affiliatewindow before you sign up - thats is all you need, examples of merchants on the network and a simple FAQ.

Anyway, you've 'converted' me, so I'll leave it to some of those still waiting in the wings to tell you their oppinions!!

[perfiliate]

Well I'm glad we have tempted you.

I see where your coming from with the extra landing page , personally I think you have it right and it would be a good idea. I dont think it would involve much work and it wouldbe nice to have less confused affiliates.

I think it would go hand in hand with some of the network exclusives we are setting up at the moment as well.

Ill certainly be making this point heard and ill see what we can do.

Suggestions from affiliates will make us stronger, I lke DGM2 very much in their style as they seem to grow from affiliates advice on what they really want. Id like to think we can be like that too.

The more feedback the better

[JF]

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Jf keeps metioning 'Perlaffiliate' whats Perlaffiliate?[/quote]

Don't think I've ever mentioned "Perlaffiliate", unless I forgot to check for typos before posting!

Don't be put off because they appear to have two names. UK Affiliates are also DGM, and CJ use the qksrv.net domain, what Perfilliate/buy.at is doing is no more confusing.


I have mentioned several times that their system works, and they pay on time.

But unless there's a merchant that's unique to them I wouldn't use them instead of one of the other networks.

The lack of deep linking is a big problem if you're trying to sell specific products. If they can develop the same functionality as the big networks in terms of linking options and reporting I'd use them as much as the others.

[perfiliate]

Thanks for the plug JF its nice to get good feedback like this as well.

In answer to the Deep linking buy.at can support deep linking much the same as the other networks it depends on the merchant and whether they can.

What we are doing at the moment is a re vamp of the logged in area for affiliates which will make merchants who can be deeped linked too more obvious and also give examples of a deep link to the said merchant.

This will then make it a lot easier for affiliates to log in and know exactly who they can and cant deep link to and how.

To be honest its taken us this long to get round to some of the important stuff for affiliates as we have been flat out with the Charities and Sports clubs side.

We are aware of things like the deep linking and how important they are for sales by affiliates and thats what we aoll want loads of sales so it will be sorted soon, to coincide with the new merchants. 1st quarter 2003

[perfiliate]

Hi all ,

I forgot to say if anyone wants info on deep linking in the meantime on any buy.at merchants then as always just drop me an e mail and if its possible ill get it sorted.

malcolm.cowley@perfiliate.com

[Pistol101]

Malcolm,

Do you run a 2nd tier commission structure?

Pete

[perfiliate]

At them moment we dont offer any second tier commissions. That is not to say that we wont ever just not at the moment.

By the way sorry for the delay in replying.

Cheers.

[davthp]

Isn't the whole Perfiliate scheme ultimately geared against us as affiliates and in effect leading to a mass of 'same' style shopping fronts. Apart from the fact that they may have some individual merchants exclusive to them they actually offer little to us. They seem very similar to those charity sites that began to appear.

I for one see no use for them in the present form but would be interested in any proper affiliate scheme.