eCommerce and

Stepping into the realm of supply chain I knew there would be a learning curve.  The first lesson I learned? Basic Vocabulary.

I was sitting in a meeting when I began to hear words such as: Manufacturer, distributor, wholesaler, supplier, drop-shipper, and end user/consumer. Not only was the conversation over my head, but my experience in customer service did not even lend a helping hand as to the differences between these roles in supply chain.  In addition to recognizing and understanding the roles that each play in the supply chain cycle I also needed to realize that these terms may be different across channels, lucky for me we are a pure play internet retailer, which means for the time being I truly needed to understand supply chain roles in relation to eCommerce.

Working in customer service at PlumberSurplus.com, I knew of manufacturers like Kohler, Delta, Rheem and others that are among our Top Sellers; but I didn’t know what the differences were between a distributor, manufacturer and a wholesaler. What about those that bought American Standard and re-branded it? Are they a manufacturer? Can we buy directly from a manufacturer? What is the difference between a manufacturer and a brand name? I sat through the meeting praying that no one would ask me a question. When I got back to my desk, I quickly went to Google, hoping for a quick synopsis that would allow me to at least understand my notes from the meeting. Surprisingly, I could not find one single post that explained the basic functions, differences or attributes of these supply chain relationships.

So… here you go. My list is not all inclusive, as I am still on that learning curve that I mentioned; hopefully, if you are ever in a similar situation you will be able to at least get the gist of the relationships here.

• Manufacturer: The word manufacture comes from Latin roots meaning “to make by hand”. A manufacturer turns raw materials into finished goods. Classic American examples include: Ford, General Motors and Boeing.
• Brand Name: A manufacturer can have more than one brand name. A great example of this is General Mills cereals. General Mills is the manufacturer, while Cheerios, Kix, and Wheaties are the name brands.
• Manufacturer Representative:  A manufacturer representative is the driving force of sales behind a manufacturer’s product. They can be non-stocking, use consignment or have a buy-sell relationship. If a manufacturer has a manufacturer representative, then the representative is the manufacturers face to the public.
• Distributor/Wholesaler: Distributors and wholesalers are the middle-men between the manufacturer and consumers. The terms are used synonymously even though there can be a difference. Both buy in bulk, and then re-sale the products in different channels. The main difference is Wholesalers frequently physically assemble, sort and grade goods in large lots, break bulk, repack and redistribute in smaller lots.
• Drop-shipper: A drop-shipper is a type of distributor/wholesaler. A drop shipper will purchase from the manufacturer, and then drop-ship orders directly to consumers from a third party order.
• Retailer: A retailer is a storefront where consumers can walk in store and physically buy the manufacturers product. Now, with the internet, we have developed e-tailers. An e-tailer is an online storefront that consumers can browse and purchase the manufacturers products over the internet.
• Supplier: The term supplier can be used for any of the above one-to-one relationships, and some industries refer to suppliers as vendors. If the manufacturer has a representative, then the manufacturer is the representatives’ supplier. Similarly, the manufacturer’s representative that the wholesaler purchases from is the wholesaler’s supplier…and on down the distribution chain.
• End User/Consumer: Consumers are those who purchase the products from retailers. Shoppers. When you buy a product for your use, you are a consumer…the end user.

These definitions can be applied across mediums, into your realm of business. Now there are exceptions, like with computers and software, but for the most part, you can use this basic vocabulary list in your next meeting, and be sure that everyone is on the same page when you are talking about a new wholesaler relationship that you have acquired that will drop-ship products for you.

Normally I try to keep my blog posts “above the fold” technically, and shield you from the code that makes everything work under the hood. I realize that there are many great tech blogs out there, many of which I read, and that readers of this blog are more interested in the business of eCommerce rather than the technical aspects that make it work. As such, I try to talk about technical things of interest, but without any tech jargon or degree needed.
 
Recently this has begun to backfire on me, however, as some now view my job as “plug and play”. In discussing the available technologies and possible usages of them, I’ve been hearing comments like:

“Doesn’t SQL just do that already?” – In response to trying to figure out the best way to write search relevancy logic.

 “I’m sure Microsoft has figured out a way to do that” – Yes, they have. They have developed programming languages and technologies that allow highly skilled professionals to spend long hours writing code to accomplish that task.

Or my personal favorite, when comparing our needs to a product written for a different database, in a different language, and has been in development for 7 years – “we can likely do whatever they are doing”.

In an effort to reduce complexity when talking to non-technical users and speak in plain English, I’ve apparently erroneously conveyed to them that there is really nothing technical involved in eCommerce development. As far as some know, we have a “website”, a “server”, a “database”, and a long 3 pronged cord that connects them all seamlessly. Fortunately for us, this cord also connects to Amazon, Google, and our supply chain network as well.
 
I considered just posting a few large blocks of code to keep you on your toes, but figured it would get the same blank look I do when I try to explain what I do to my kids. So instead, just a friendly reminder to all you business types to give your developer a hug today, and be thankful you don’t have to hear about fine tuning SQL procedures for maximum speed and relevancy.

Lately over here at the Surplus we’ve been focused on a lot of internal development to better streamline our processes, interactions with customers and suppliers, and other types of projects that add value to us as an organization but remain invisible to our customers. However, we have been looking ahead to this year’s development projects and have plans to do a lot of work on what we call “Customer Experience”.

With this focus, I’ve been poking around, looking for ideas and the technologies that may support some of the cooler features we may want to implement. In a post Web 2.0 world, we are looking for things that really add value to the customer, not just every cool little gadget, widget or flashy thing that might look cool.

One topic that has been particular warm in the online developer community as of late is the pros and cons of the new interactivity features as well as the tools used to develop them (read: AJAX, JQuery, javascript). In an effort to make the web work much more like a desktop application, developers are using more and more sophisticated techniques to push data back and forth without the user noticing. This provides much more real time feedback to the user, as well as adds a lot of functionality and makes interacting with the internet a lot more convenient with fewer time-wasting page reloads.

Take, for example, a familiar concept I’m sure you’ve seen and used yourself, what we call the “Product Selector”, where a user can choose a high level product they want to purchase, such as a bathtub, and using various slider bars, checkboxes, and other mechanisms, narrow down the result set to see the products that match their filtering criteria. BlueNile.com has used this for their diamond search for a long time. Product selectors like this are often very helpful and kind of fun to use. It increases customer retention and gives customers the ability to really find what they are looking for, or better yet, shows them a range of products that meet their criteria. However, there are drawbacks to the product selectors, including the inability for Google to crawl your products that are only accessible through the selector, the inability to have direct links to filtered results, and the ability to build a tool that the customer finds intuitive and helpful.

One big problem web-developers face in this post web 2.0 world is finding the balance between cool and functional. There is a fine line between enhancing a customer’s experience and frustrating the heck out of them. What is intuitive for a developer may seem obtuse to a customer (I’m pretty sure the developer is right though).

You can make a web page take you through 5 steps to create an account, choose your options, confirm your purchase, and agree to the terms, all in one single, seamless AJAX-enabled application. That is, until they realize they want to ship it to Aunt Gertrude instead, click their browser’s back button, and lose all the information they’ve entered, frustrating them to the point of abandoning the process.

Many of these new technologies break the expectations of the browser’s back button and bookmarks. Often these technologies can completely block search engine’s ability to find relevant data on your site. Often a page refresh or other unexpected action can cause the user to lose their place and what they were doing.

As a fan of emerging web technologies, I am looking forward to tackling some of these challenges in the coming year. However, I will be sure to be on the lookout for the unexpected consequences of clever web development.

So stay tuned, keep hitting F5, and look for some new features coming soon!

Some upgrades are proactive. After careful consideration and considerable time spent evaluating options, you decide it is time to replace a crucial component with a newer, better version.  Sometimes things go bump in the night; a server crash, your car’s transmission falls out, or Number 5 needs more input.  Whatever the cause, sometimes upgrades are forced upon you and you have to react quickly.

And sometimes upgrades are needlessly mandated; say, when a third party vendor, that you rely on for a major aspect of your business, sends you an email like this out of the blue:

Translation: We want to upgrade you to our new, unproven, untested system. And we want it when we want it, not when you want it. Oh yeah, and please do this as you head into the holiday shopping season.

This email caught us off guard and created quite a stir in our department. As a small to medium sized business, we don’t have the unlimited resources to do whatever we want, whenever we want. We plan our development projects out and schedule them in advance. So when we have a board full of projects such as EDI integrations, a new supplier interface, and a backend architecture upgrade already slated, and then a vendor, we pay for the use of their stable product, tries to dictate to us when to upgrade an already working product, we're not exactly thrilled.

The email went on to inform us that they realize that the upgrade window and timeline was small, so they’d happily recommend some high-priced consultants we could use to do the upgrade. How nice of them! So now we can pay through the nose to do an unnecessary upgrade we don’t want to do.

Apparently this didn’t go over well for their other customers either.  A few weeks later we received an email stating that due to the response from their customers, they were postponing the upgrade until after the New Year. It turns out that customers who pay good money for a reliable product don’t like being told how to run their business. And we don’t like being told to make major changes heading into the busy season. But mainly, we really don’t like throwing money and resources away for upgrades we don’t want or need.

Hopefully you don’t have this experience anytime soon. And if you do, make sure you let them know how you feel about it. Ultimately they have to listen to the people who pay their salaries.

I’d just like to take a minute out of my day to thank our Manager of Customer Service, Josh, for his management of our internet connection. You see, when we were small and starting out, Josh was there from the beginning and it fell on him to set up our internet connection. Then as we grew, moved, expanded, and moved again, Josh has maintained his maniacal death grip management of our internet connectivity.  In fact, Josh single handedly maintains all of our connection issues, including designing and implementing our VOIP phone system. And a job well done, I might add.

However, up until very recently, we at PlumberSurplus.com were the red-headed step children from the wrong side of the tracks, literally. Well, not the red-headed part, but some of us are step children, and we were definitely on the wrong side of the tracks. Due to the archaic monopoly structure that limits cable service options, our area was serviced by Charter cable, who in turn refused to service our particular building. And although we are a mere stones throw from the regional headquarters of Charter, we have been unable to get Charter high speed internet access due to the fact that we are located 50 feet on the wrong side of the railroad tracks.

So here we are, a fast-growing, expanding company, complete with VOIP (did I mention that the “IP” in “VOIP” refers to internet protocol), sharing a slow T1 connection at several times the price we could pay for high speed cable internet. Download a large file and be ready to become the office pariah and heaven forbid you have a webinar to call into. But thanks to Josh’s relentless pursuit and a little luck, a couple of months ago we finally got Charter to service our area, and now we cruise the internet at true broadband speeds. Ah, life is good. We have become spoiled by our high speed connection, streaming episodes of The Office and playing Sudoku at will.

That is, until the day the sun stopped shining; the day Charter disconnected us. Due to some clerical error on their end, one recent morning Charter disconnected us. The internet was no more. We panicked. We didn’t know what to do. We quickly reverted to our early days before Al Gore invented the internet; selling bathtubs on the street corner, filing invoices in a drawer, and using those calculators with the rolls of paper that keep a record of your every keystroke.

Josh alone remained calm, level-headed, and undaunted. Since we still had our T1 line (dedicated solely to our VOIP system), Josh set about restoring our internet connection via the T1 line. As we set out to restore connectivity to the masses of employees huddled around a stapler, I was concerned. How long would it take? How complicated would the switch over be, and then the subsequent switch back once Charter reconnected us? Fortunately, it took longer to vocalize my fears than it did to enact the redundancy plan.

For Josh had designed the system, spanning two buildings across the street, with redundancy in mind. He simply patched a couple of connections and we were up and running, splitting the T1 connection between our VOIP and networking systems. A couple of hours later when Charter got it all figured out, we simply reversed the process.

The best part is that when Charter made the same mistake the next day, I didn’t even need Josh to restore the connection. As the office descended into panic, I simply walked across the street, made the appropriate connections, and waltzed back into the office full of adoring fans, all thinking I was a networking genius. All thanks to Josh!

We recently made the decision to switch SEM bid management partners. It's not that something went awry with our previous partner, we just outgrew their product and it didn't make sense for us to make the switch to their product that would have fit our size. Fortunately an existing partner in another channel had a solution that leveraged bid technology that we were already familiar with. As we reviewed what worked, what didn't work, and what was missing, I put together the following list of items that were important to us in the decision making process.

1. Budget - This is probably the largest factor to consider when looking for new solutions, or when reevaluating your current solution. If you aren't looking for a different tool and are content with current performance, perhaps you can negotiate a lower rate or fee if you've been with a particular partner for a certain period of time. As we researched alternative solutions, we had to clearly define what our budget was. With a set budget, we could quickly eliminate the solutions we could not afford. No one can tell you that your organization can afford to spend more (this can also be a good bargaining point). Surely, there are some amazing partners in the SEM bid management arena, but with better tools typically comes higher prices. Our past partner had a flat monthly fee which was favorable, as we prefer fixed costs over variable costs and other pricing models. We could not afford to step up to our old partner's top product mainly due to price, and the new solution that we ultimately chose has a pricing model that is based on a revenue share instead of percent of ad spend.
2. Optimization Settings - If you are a sophisticated organization you will need the ability to optimize SEM campaigns against multiple objectives. Maximizing or optimizing just one variable won't scale or be as sufficient as your organization grows and matures. Also, look for a solution that will let you set targets at account, campaign and ad group levels. We previously used a portfolio based approach to target one goal for our account.  This was great at the beginning, but may not work well for some merchants, and eventually did not scale with our growth. Different product groups in our campaigns (with different margins and sales velocities) need different targets and our SEM tool needed to support this. 
3. Automation & Integration - If you add our growing product offering, multiple websites (and more planned), continuously changing product stock levels, and my lack of time (which is always diminishing) you find yourself with the need to have automated solutions to do the grunt work.  Not only do these solutions need to be automated, but they need to be easy to implement. The new solution offers automated URL tagging which is great because I shouldn't spend my time tagging tens of thousands of keyword URLs. This solution also offers tools to generate new keywords which aren't in your current inventory. How sweet is that! While I'm sleeping in on Saturday morning the system is finding new keywords for me that users are actually using. Another helpful feature we found to be extremely helpful was the ability to pause and resume keywords automatically based on actual inventory levels. Before, with the old system, I had to login and pause keywords and ad groups manually when we ran out of stock.  Often times the system wouldn’t update until a day or two after we actually ran out of the product. This meant we were potentially still spending dollars on products we couldn't sell because we didn't have them in stock. When the product came back in stock, I had to resume the paused keywords, and again there was often a delay until this update could be processed.
4. Monitoring Conversion Assists - With separate tools for CSEs and SEM, we had no visibility of conversions that came from multiple touch points. We would pause a keyword because it wasn’t profitable.  We would target different objectives for our CSE efforts but could not tie these efforts together for the best outcome. It's not that we were naive to this idea in the past; we just didn't have the resources to track this effectively. Now with CSE and SEM under the same roof, we can identify when users interact with our ads across multiple channels and sites. We won't kill a keyword because it doesn't convert by its lonesome, because we've observed this keyword as being an integral part of the conversion funnel. If you pull out a keyword in that funnel, the whole conversion path could fall apart.
5. Agility & Growth - The world of eCommere changes daily. Our business continually faces new and unique challenges. We need a partner who can grow with us and who can develop solutions to overcome newly discovered obstacles. As our business moves toward the next level in both sales and sophistication it was imperative that our partners can grow with us. Ask the SEM tool provider what their development and product release approach is?  Do they roll out releases every few weeks, or wait months before new features are released and bugs are corrected? Will this partnership grow stale before the length of your contract is up, or will it be a lasting relationship that goes for many years?

As we bid adieu to one partner, we welcome the other and look forward to success together. This is just our experience, limited as it may be, but I'd still like to hear what other aspects are important to you so comments are welcome...

Welcome to my third installment of Affiliate Watch. I've had some great help reviewing applications from the intern department over the last month while I worked on a large SEM project, but was able to pick out some affiliate websites that I thought we could learn from. Let's see what kind of sites applied...

Site 1: Surfin For Style - If your target audience is female and the products you sell are Coach Handbags at discount prices then this affiliate is for you; provided that you also sell on eBay. SurfinForStyle uses an aesthetically pleasing flash widget to show hundreds of eBay auctions for Coach Products. While eBay offers store referral credits for the seller when a sale is driven by this type of affiliate there are many reasons why I would steer clear from these types of affiliates.   The opportunity for branding is significantly decreased in this situation as the consumer will see the eBay brands and remember purchasing from eBay rather than one of our websites.  We prefer to have publishers driving traffic to our websites directly so that we have the opportunity to expose our brand.  It helps that eBay offsets part of the FVF (Final Value Fee) with the referral credit. I think it's a great idea that eBay and eBay to Go (in beta) has developed a tool that makes it easy for publishers to promote products listed on eBay.  I am pretty sure that the tool was aimed at having shoppers promote products and create their own "unique" content, but how unique is the content if the widget users just repost someone else’s listing?

Site 4: The Schlott Company - "Resource articles to get your business off the ground" is their tag line. I wonder if any businesses found this blog useful, as they stopped posting back in May. In all fairness I actually visited the company's real home page (which has no link or mention of their blog) and found their portfolio quite decent. They ought to update their publisher profile to the company home page not the blog. Once I saw this, I offered them a spot in our program.

Actionable take-aways for affiliates:

1. Publisher Profile Information - always keep this up to date, in the example of The Schlott Company, they would have been declined had I not taken the steps to view their real website. Put your best foot forward, you only get one chance for a first impression (or your only impression).
2. Don't use animated gif images - I may have mentioned this at least once or twice before.
3. Don't get mad and irate at us when we decline your website - Unfounded, harassing phone calls and emails won't help your case.
4. Get a real webhost - We can all tell when you are using a free webhosting service and it shows. There are many services available that cost less than a Big Mac value meal per month. I don't want to see long, hyphenated, multiple directory, unrelated domain names.

• Vanessa suggests you read an article discussing the recent stock market activity and your online business. Hey! Since when was I classified as "cheap talent"?
• One of the largest players in our vertical, Home Depot recently announced price cuts to gain back customers and help lift weak sales. What are leaders in your niche doing to combat slow economic times?
• I want to give a shout out to my friend Nathan Decker of Evogear.com who is a new dad. Congratulations! Can't wait to see the little one on the slopes with you.
• Hopefully all you expert SEM Managers out there noticed the new AdWords Quality Score changes go live. I was curious to see how well my keywords were doing relative to other advertisers. It doesn't appear that we were hurt at all, in fact I have lots of keywords with very high scores. Thanks to my AdWords Team for the tips on account structure! 
  
  
  
   

• In case you are directionally challeged, Google Maps for Mobile has just what you need! New features include street view, as if you couldn't just look up from your phone and see for yourself.
• Maybe I talk too much on the phone and this is just a sign to save me from going over my minutes but my BlueAnt Supertooth Light bluetooth car speakerphone broke and now I'm on my third one. The product provides exceptional call quality, but there may have been some sort of production issue with the previous one's I had. Their great customer service shone bright when they sent me a new one via next day air with a prepaid return slip inside. That's how customer service should be done.
• I thought about using more text messages but prices have been increasing year after year. See what our Senate is doing to help.
• OutdoorPros.com was the first "copy and paste" to launch a new vertical for us. As we've shared with the folks at Internet Retailer we have been working to create additional websites for new product lines. Earlier this week I happened to run across this great comic from Drew at Toothpaste for Dinner and I couldn't help but worry about when we launch the next site or about Lisa Barone if she get's another cat... 
  
  
  

• New Microsoft commercials (thanks Andy) are out. I couldn't help but think about my grandma using her PC to rent Netflix.
• Excited about Chrome but don't want to leave your FireFox plugins behind? Matt Cutts put together some creative solutions for you to have your cake and eat it to, sort of.
• "I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller" (to the tune of "I wish" by Skee-Lo), but really I wish I was a bigger blogger so I could go to BlogWorld Expo. If you're a blogger looking to make some cash as an affiliate, be sure to check out the panel with Shawn Collins, Tim Jones and Mike Allen titled Affiliate Marketing Secrets for Bloggers.

Fish or Cut Bait?  This phrase came to mind this week as I have been putting off some new development to assess our website’s infrastructure. Lately I’d noticed more and more lag time and performance issues and wanted to take a look under the hood before it became a serious problem. Since our current systems were developed, we’ve added scores of thousands of products, orders, and customers to our databases, and experienced high site volume and traffic growth. And while things are still working pretty well, I thought it was time to address these issues.  That is before we hit that next level in daily orders, data storage, etc., and overwhelm our current systems.

Fish or Cut Bait? 

For you land-lubbers unfamiliar with the term “fish or cut bait”, this term refers to the age old fishing operational dilemma: Is my time better spent catching more fish now, or cutting bait so I can catch more fish later? If I decide to fish now, I may catch more fish, but soon I will run out of bait. Or I could cut bait right now, but that means I will not be catching fish. It is a valid question, and one that is almost as inextricable as the “Tastes Great – Less Filling” debate. 

Obviously, fishing is far more appealing. We all get excited when sales pour in, new suppliers are established, new markets are tapped, and new systems are implemented. Fishing is fun. Fishing feels good. Fishing is what makes the world go ‘round.

By contrast, cutting bait is not as exciting. Making the decision to slow growth, delay new supplier relationships, and hold back products until we stabilize shipping performance does not feel very rewarding. Putting off new development projects so that we can optimize database and site performance can feel like we are spinning our wheels and spending time and money on something that “already works”. And cutting mackerel and cod leaves your hands feeling slimy, and you smelling like, well a dead fish.

Why Not Fish and Cut Bait?

In a perfect world, we have fishermen AND bait-cutters. OK, pop quiz: raise your hand if you live and run your business in a perfect world. Unless your hand is raised (and by the way, you probably look a bit foolish to the person sitting next to you), you have to spend some time fishing and some time cutting bait just like the rest of us.

By nature, we want what’s new and exciting. We want to keep pushing ahead, keep forging new paths, and keep growing at a break neck pace. But in reality, sometimes that is the worst thing you can do. We’ve all heard stories of businesses that fail because they grew too fast. That seems paradoxical on the surface, as “growing too fast” generally means more revenue. But if you aren’t prepared to handle the rapid influx of business, you can get buried in the avalanche that you worked so hard to create.

So I encourage you to take a brief time out to sit back, evaluate your operations, and do a quick SWOT analysis before leaping into that next venture. Make sure your systems, procedures, and employees are prepared to handle the growth before you get there. Make sure your site, server, and databases can handle all the traffic you want to drive to it. Invest in the resources it takes to ensure solid operational performance for the sales you want to get. Make sure you are staffed to handle the influx of orders so you don’t overburden your employees. Then rinse and repeat as necessary.

It may not be as thrilling as landing Moby Dick, but then again that didn’t end well for Ahab.

Welcome to the second edition of Affiliate Watch, the post dedicated to affiliate publishers that we can count on to create revenue and the publishers who could use some work.  This month I was pleasantly surprised to see some higher quality websites come through my application inbox.  Don’t worry though, there were still a few that were utterly terrible. Let's get down to the business of reviewing my picks for the month.

Site 1: CheapStuffGuide.com - Any site that has an "instant 3d headings" toolbar and uses the toolbar to create their header image isn’t going to get the design of the year award.  Unprofessional images and design are the reason why this site would not be accepted into our program. Besides the aesthetics, not many of the links to subcategories work. The domain is about the only good thing going for this site.  Unfortunately I was not guided to any particular products but thrown onto a page full of widgets and a plethora of banner ads (not to mention animated gif images).

Site 2: Shopping-Bargains.com - If you are familiar with the affiliate space and the term super-affiliates then you probably know who Mike Allen is. Mike has run Shopping-Bargains.com for almost 10 years and provides "Everything Online Shoppers Need to Save Money". I like Mike's site because he has made it simple to view, easy to navigate, and provides visitors with clear instructions on how to redeem listed offers and coupons. Mike has been nominated and won several awards over the years pertaining to his level of excellence as an online affiliate. Due to recent improvements the website pages are loading a lot faster than they used too.  What I also like is that the team is always pushing forward and trying new avenues such as a Facebook app, and most recently a product search engine. In my opinion Shopping-Bargains.com sets the bar for coupon and deal websites. 

Site 3: netleads2u.com - Did my browser forget to load the images and CSS? Seriously, it’s a white page and a few links. A simplistic design has its benefits, yet the lack of any design, logos or images makes me think this publisher was looking to launch a quick website and probably do nothing further.  Perhaps they will come back at a later date and add the aforementioned elements to improve the site, but my initial thought was that the publisher was just looking to make a quick buck. How are affiliate program managers supposed to take the website or the webmaster seriously if there has been no demonstration of effort or time put in to the site prior to applying for a program?  I think this is an important question for affiliate websites to consider before applying to programs. 

Site 4: Sneaky Undisclosed URL -   Be careful. Pay attention to who may be attempting to join your program, otherwise you may give away your secret sauce to those you don’t want to have it. I've seen applications come in from those we have chosen not to do business with in the past applying for our program.  These applications may be from vendors, partners, publishers or even competitors. I just came across an application for a company who offers multiple services, but one of their core solutions involves improving data relationships between manufacturers and retailers. We chose another vendor for this solution; therefore we don’t want their competitors to be able to disseminate our product data information, as it is extremely valuable to us. Another example of this happened when an affiliate website was launched that would have been a great fit for our vertical at PlumberSurplus.com at the time.  I say “would have” because upon review of the application we discovered that the site was started by parties affiliated with one of our largest competitors. Folks you may not want in your program could already be downloading your data feed and finding out what your commission rates are. 

Let’s take a look at the tips for both publishers and affiliate managers this month:

1. Don't use online banner/marquee generators, they are cheap looking and unprofessional. 
2. Be sure to have a working email address. I receive plenty of email bouncebacks due to typos, full inboxes and more. 
3. If a publisher knows more about a certain subject, let them help! They will feel a sense of ownership in your program and website. Be mindful that I am not suggesting that managers exploit the work of publishers for benefit. Recently at OutdoorPros.com we had a publisher inform us that the information on a particular line of Gerber LMF II Knives wasn’t up to par. He provided us with valuable information and personal insight that helped us to improve our data in a timely manner, and the publisher was able to begin promoting the products sooner. 
4. Program Managers may have automated approvals setup. This means there is certain criteria that would cause a publisher application to be declined. If you feel that this may have occurred in error, simply email the affiliate program manager and ask politely for a second look. More often than not, they get the approval into my program.
5. Keep product information up to date. From time to time a visitor finds a product we sell being advertised on an affiliate's website with a lower price than we show on our website. Customers get mad thinking we are trying to bait and switch, and I get upset at publishers for having incorrect pricing. We might lose a potential customer and sale, and the affiliate loses potential commissions. No one wins. I understand that the frequency of price updates may depend on your niche.  Unfortunately for us, product prices change often.  We do our best to keep our data feeds accurate and hope that publishers are doing the same. Keeping fresh data makes everyone happy.

Look for next month's edition with more reviews and tips and I welcome any tips and suggestions of your own.