Rakuten Model Question
Hi -
Do any of you have experience with the Rakuten model? I'd like to build something similar to my beta without too much of a need to get every single affiliate business to give me their approval and a generic link that can be used for each user.
So, my main question is: Is this something where you can take existing affiliate links online and share them with users? Or do you need to have a contract with each store (nike, adidas, apple, etc) and receive multiple unique ID's for each user to have?
Trending on Indie Hackers
You do not need to make separate deals/contracts with each company, Rakuten is indeed an option for that. Competitors are Sovrn, Awin and some others.
You could compare margins and use links from several networks at the same time (e.g. it's probably interesting to join the Amazon affiliate program directly instead of using one of the networks for that).
That being said, my experience is that building a lucrative website is extremely hard with an affiliate business model - you need a lot of volume before you get any decent revenue. I don't really believe in it, it should not be the primary source of income for a new project IMHO.
Thanks for your reply. Although the affiliate piece is a nice contributor to the app, it's not the main revenue driver.
There's a catch with our product and the affiliate model. Let's say we compare and find the best margins from all the various affiliate networks out there (Rakuten, Amazon, Sovrn, etc).
Users come on to our platform and they make a purchase through the unique link that we received from those businesses. They buy from us instead of the main store (Nike, Adidas, etc) because they want a discount as well.
How do we give them the deal (2% discount, etc)? And then how does that scale to let's say 100 people using the same link to buy the same item or different item from the same store?
Here are a few app examples - www.getmiles.com and fluz.app
Are you thinking of a cashback model?
With affiliates, they still buy from the main store, but your cookie is stored in their browser so the main store knows they should give a commission to you for this order.
Some publishers will give you promo codes you can distribute together with your affiliate links, you could use these.
Another option: in a cashback model, you reward the customers based on the commission you receive. But that means your margin becomes even slimmer (or the rewards should not cost you anything, e.g. "reward" them with the aforementioned promo codes).
In most cases, this cookie counts for any order made (within a certain timeframe), it shouldn't necessarily be the product you linked to.
Thank you for your response.
Yes we are thinking of a cashback model.
To make things easier to understand, we would probably need to have some form of traced links that go to each of the users right? Like bitly for example? This would allow us to have 1 link from Rakuten (or other provider) and then we take that 1 link and make it 10,100,1000 links for the users who sign up?
Thank you for your help.
If you're going for cashback, I'm sure there's plenty of information available online about how to start a website like that.
Technically, you could indeed redistribute links you get from existing networks yourself, yes. You'd have to attach a parameter to each link to know who to attribute the earnings to.
There are probably some tools out there to start a cashback website without having to implement it yourself.
But anyways, I'm no expert on the matter and the IH forum is probably not the best place to get full instructions about this.