Digital Direct won’t give affiliates access to their full product feed. Why?
I thought I would put some of my resources into building a mini site to promote an audio visual merchant, for the likes of Plasma TV’s etc. After a bit of searching and some recommendations I decided to give Digital Direct a go.
So I emailed their affiliate manager and told him that I would like to work with them and that I would build a site based on their products and nobody else’s. I would also promote the site via ppc using my budget, and therefore my risk. All I would need from Digital Direct is their product feed, for keyword building purposes. He replied and thought it was a great idea, would love to work with me etc. etc. but they would only give me their top 350 products, not the whole feed! They would then review my activity after 3 months…
“as we want to see what you can achieve with our main product feed before we provide you with our full product feed“.
Eh? I explained to them that in order to really make a go of the ppc campaign and to make it a success I would need their full product feed. After all, thousands of other merchants allow affiliates access to their full product feed without issue. I mean there is nothing confidential in there, its just a list of the products they sell for goodness’ sake!!
Anyway, needless to say I’ve binned Digital Direct. What a ridiculous, stupid policy. I offer to spend tens of thousands of pounds to promote them on an entirely risk free basis and they won’t give me their product feed. Bizarre.
What I’m listening to right now: Ciara – “Like A Boy”
Sunday, March 25th, 2007 at 11:54 am and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
March 25th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Hi Kieron
Don’t Digital Direct have a bit of history when it comes to not working with their affiliates very well?
http://www.a4uforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=44716
Don’t think I’d ever want to promote them after that.
March 25th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
Yes indeed. However I had been told they had cleaned up their act and were now a very good performing program.
Plenty more fish in the sea however.
March 26th, 2007 at 12:09 am
If you’d like to spend 10s of thousands promoting http://www.lovehoney.co.uk we’d be happy to have you
Join direct or (next week) through Affiliate Future, which Jess is managing for you.
Be happy to have you!
March 26th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
this is a total guess, but:
they’ve probably got a ‘top 350′ feed already set up, but would have to spend some time coding an ‘all products’ feed.
that probably needs someone’s boss to sign it of & (knowing most companies) the affiliate program manager won’t be able to do that, so someone from IT would have to be roped in. Without any solid proof that it’s going to achieve results, nobody wants to stick their neck out.
Silly but it happens every day!
March 27th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
they should hire their affiliate team/manager after it.
seems really silly.
March 29th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
With your impressive record Kieron, I think this probably sounds like a merchant who is fairly blinkered to the win win proposition you presented to them. I don’t think they realised their horse had actually come in, in the end it will be their loss. I trust you may have targeted a viable alternative who is more appreciative.
April 1st, 2007 at 5:57 pm
This company was caught out trying to screw affiliates by Nadeem and I don’t think anybody should work with them… or Affiliate Window for that matter who allow such an unscrupulous retailer to continue having an affiliate program with them.
April 12th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
It makes you wonder sometimes…whether it’s the company or the affiliate manager making this decision they clearly don’t have a clue!
Graham
Buyagift.com