Presto Bloggo

PrestoGifto aside, being an affiliate myself, I know the small fish in a big pond feeling. What goes along with being a small fish is the sense that we’re not being heard and that there are bigger and more important fish to listen to. So I was surprised to keep hearing at the Affiliate Summit that, hey, merchants want to hear from *all* the fish.

For instance, at the Affiliate Summit, I was having lunch with Jen from J. Goode Designs. Jen is an extremely prolific merchant that has thousands of popular products aimed at a young audience. (Just to give you an idea of breadth, she owns Lil Goodies, Goode Girls, Lil Babies, Lil Animals, and, good grief, they go on and on…) I was telling her how a customer of PrestoGifto was complaining that he couldn’t find items with a rather obscure theme and she looked at me and said, “Jessie, if there is EVER a request like that, just tell me!”

The problem to solve is how to open the dialog and get a mutually benefitial line of communication open between the affiliate and the merchant. If I’m a CJ affiliate, who do I speak with? How do I communicate with the merchants at CafePress?

One option is to go directly to the merchant. If they are part of a large network, like CJ, I have had really good luck just e-mailing the affiliate manager (that contact info is often on the merchant website or on the newsletters they send). Even though the CafePress merchants are usually eager to hear feedback, often, at CafePress, there is no way to get a merchant’s contact information on their sites (although PrestoGifto is hoping that will change). In the case of CafePress, send us an e-mail or put a comment into this blog and we’ll do our best to help open those lines of communication.

We were at the recent Affiliate Summit in Orlando, and had a great time putting faces with names and getting to know a bunch of people we hadn’t met yet. One theme that emerged in many of my converstions was that in any network, there were a lot of affiliates that were not very technical. These folks are often frustrated, because current tools aren’t really for them, so they can’t create the user experience that they’d like to. Solutions are typically manual, like having a consultant configure a component and email it to them. But these affiliates don’t like paying extra for that type of help, and advertisers can’t afford to provide it free of charge.

This is pretty encouraging. We think a lot about how to help affiliates succeed and give them great control over the look and feel of their store, without making them tinker with HTML or scripts. Great to know that other folks think that’s pretty important, too.

Lucas (aka “Benny the Breakdown Truck”) got a fabulous new Rotem Gear original from his very own DiggerPerson shop and loves it!

Although we’ve still got our “blind” page up at the main PrestoGifto site, we’re planning on being at the Affilate Summit in Orlando (specifically, Disney World) July 9 - 11. We’ll be there next to Deborah Carney at the CafePress booth, handing out buttons, flyers and cards and talking both about the CafePress affiliate program and PrestoGifto.