Life As An Overstock.com Affiliate
From my blog name, you know I started off as an Amazon affiliate. I had seen good 2008. 2009 was not as good, partly due to economy and partly due to Amazon affiliate web services (which now they call product advertising) api changes like signing the requests. I never had the time so far to go back and fix my scripts. My revenue for 2010 is horrible.
The only good thing that happened this year is a decent revenue from my other website that uses Overstock.com as the main source of revenue. It’s actually a website built just to showcase Overstock products using their data feeds. Here are some key statistics that I have been reviewing today, mid-way through the year, and wanted to share them with fellow affiliates.
First, Overstock.com uses Commission Junction (they changed from Linkshare). So, the numbers below are coming from Commission Junction reports.
Total number of clicks: 990
Sale Amount: $4427.79
Items Sold: 38
Sales : 21 (One order can have multiple items, hence the difference)
CTR: 3.06%
CR: 2.12%
EPC: $28.70
and the most important metric (or show me the money :)), commissions: $284.12
From EPC, each click is generating $0.287 which is not bad. Actually, I had some stupid mistake in my scripts that probably cost a lot of money. Realized it half way through this period and ever since things have actually been much better. I will probably post these details in the future where they are going to be more accurate.
One thing is, I don’t directly link to Overstock. Instead, I redirect the click and hence internally track each click. So, some of the additional details that I have are
No of clicks: 969
No of unique visitors: 712
No of clicks (US): 712
No of unique visitors (US): 540
So, the EPC is actually even higher if you consider only US visitors. My internal record of 969 tracks very closely to what CJ reports as 990. Usually my internal count should be more than CJ if at all due to network issues, but the reason you see otherwise is because I have cleaned up some clicks in my internal database which I think are related to some search robots which didn’t follow the robots.txt instructions.
Both in 2009 and I am sure in 2010, I would be making more money through Overstock program than through Amazon’s. I am not hinting that one is better than the other. It’s just that my current websites designed for Overstock feeds are doing better than those designed for Amazon’s web services. I need to spend some time updating my Amazon scripts and see if things are going to improve. Back in 2008, I used to have people buying LCD/Plasma TVs fetching as high as $80 per transaction. Gone are those days, along with the economy, Google’s ever changing algorithms, changes to Amazon web service APIs and my laziness to fix them.
An Amazon Affiliate Blog 
Hello,
Could you please tell me how you managed to get approved for overstock.com affiliate program? I tried so many times but each time they declined my application for no reason and although I know I can re-apply for as many times as I want, it does get a bit tedious after a certain time. Maybe it is all because I am not from US? 😦
Appreciate your input on this. Thanks.
Purushyottam Ghosh
July 2, 2010 at 6:58 pm
I got rejected too. First I applied with a normal website and got rejected. Then I just took the data feed and built the website anyway and applied again with the new website. That’s when I got approved.
Actually it’s a chicken and egg problem. I can’t devote time unless I am going to get accepted into the program. And I won’t get accepted unless I have a good website. Isn’t it?
With Amazon, it’s a lot easier. I could even register with a blog on wordpress. But after that I spent a lot of time building websites with decent ideas.
I just took a chance with Overstock and it just worked.
It’s a different story altogether with Target. I wanted to apply to them, but they go through connect commerce (which is owned by Google) which is hard to get into.
S
July 3, 2010 at 4:02 am
Hi thanks for the quick reply. Sorry I did not understand this part:
“Then I just took the data feed and built the website anyway and applied again with the new website.”
Did u mean overstock feed? If so, from where did you get it from before you were accepted into their program?
I agree about the website thing, but my problem is that I already have a decent and old content website with good traffic and I used that to apply, still got rejected. Now it is just automated with cj. Only yesterday I re-applied again and cj automatically showed a message that the advertiser has declined my application. I am sure it has something to do either with my country of residence or maybe my epc/earnings.
I just wished all affiliate programs were as streamlined and easy to join as amazon.They really make the process hassle-free for affiliates and that is why they have more than 2m affiliates.
Purushyottam Ghosh
July 3, 2010 at 6:07 am
Back when Overstock was with Linkshare, they used to provide data feed downloading from their own website. With CJ, it’s possible to download the feed from CJ itself. But Overstock is still providing the data feeds through their ftp. I got accepted to Overstock when they were with Linkshare. You can learn about downloading the data feeds from Overstock.com directly at http://www.overstock.com/20793/static.html
One disadvantage to using the feed directly from Overstock is, now I can’t corelate the SKU numbers that CJ shows and those of Overstock. They are different. However, I still use the old data feeds because I have a very streamlined process that was developed over a period of time. Right now, everything is automated for me and I just sit and see the commission coming in. But I should warn you, it’s not easy because much of the time we are at the mercy of Google. The pattern I noticed is that sometimes I get a decent traffic (like 40 uniques per day) for two weeks or so and then again for another two weeks there would be hardly any traffic. So, whenever the traffic increases, I end up making a bit of commission. I don’t use advertising. I even don’t bother to do SEO.
S
July 4, 2010 at 3:09 am
Let me tell you I really appreciate your taking the time to respond to my questions; this means a lot to me. 😀 Until I read your post I did not really know how feeds work, much less the fact that they are available from CJ itself. Whether or not I get accepted into Overstock, I really appreciate your answers. You are the real guy/girl. 😉
One question. You said: “I even don’t bother to do SEO.”
Then how do you get traffic from Google? Just curious. I suppose you have built a lot of backlinks over time; if so, does not that fall into the scope of “SEO”?
You are right though: we are at the mercy of Google (unless we pay for advertising, which I don’t). If you are aware of the Mayday update, I don’t know how far your sites were affected; most of my sites were not affected either, but a lot of people complained of “losing” their livelihoods. Very sad, considering the tough economic times. 😦
Thanks again for your time. 🙂
Purushyottam Ghosh
July 5, 2010 at 2:09 pm
I don’t bother to do SEO because, I realized that a website that showcases product feeds from reputed merchants won’t make it into Google’s good eyes no matter what you try. No, I have only one backlink, from my own personal website and that’s it. Both websites have a pagerank of 0 (not N/A, mind you).
Actually, even with a 0 pagerank it’s possible to get traffic. Most of my traffic is actually from the long tail of the search.
While it’s difficult to create non-duplicate content using feeds from retailers, there are a few things that you can do. I will list a few here.
1) Have good navigation system within your own site. Whether Google or any other search engine cares or not is immaterial. For small guys like us, while we don’t have control on bringing a lot of users to our websites, we have control on increasing the conversion form those users. It’s not easy, but that’s something that we control and not Google or someone and we should take that seriously.
2) Good response time. If you have lots of feed data and your queries are slow, users will run away immediately. So, it’s important to have good scripts that are as efficient as possible on a shared hosting.
3) Focused content. I think Google and other search engines frowns showing different content to users than what’s output when crawling. But there are reasons why this is good for users, especially product feeds. Usually there is a lag between crawling and the users visiting based on that content. However, data feeds are updated each day. So, there are times when you would see users visiting to a specific page of your website for a given keyword but that page doesn’t have anything related to it anymore because of the new feed. So, what I do is, identify the keyword which is used in the search and tries to get the best set of products related to those keywords when the user visits my website. Who ever might say what they want about this strategy, but my personal experience is that it gave the best conversion and I also think helped the users to get access to the information they are looking for as quickly as possible.
Bottom line, you need to keep monitoring your traffic, however little it might be and come up with strategies to do internal optimizations to increase the conversion rates. Most people only worry about search engine optimization and ignore conversion rate optimization. To all those, I want to say focus on what is in your control. By this I am not saying not to bother about SEO at all. It’s equally required. But pick the one for which you have resources and to some extent control.
S
July 6, 2010 at 3:07 am
“Actually, even with a 0 pagerank it’s possible to get traffic. Most of my traffic is actually from the long tail of the search”
Thanks for reinforcing that. It is the same with me. I have never bothered adding too many backlinks to my sites but I still get traffic, subscribers and then I follow-up with them and make money. 😉
Kathleen Calderon
April 5, 2011 at 4:22 am