Merchant Focus: RetailConcepts
For all you affiliates marketing to the outdoorsy crowd, Retail Concepts has you covered. Between their three sports focused stores, there is a niche for whatever recreational and enthusiast lifestyle you focus on.
Retail Concepts is the parent company for Sun & Ski Sports, the Ski Chalet, and Rebel Board Sports. Sun & Ski Sports is a sports specialty store with a focus on snowsports, watersports, cycling, running, camping, and skating with top brands such as The North Face, K2, Hyperlite, Brooks and more. They carry sports gear that span from the summer to winter seasons so the selling potential with this site is year round.
The Ski Chalet is a highly focused snowsports retail specialist for both skiing and snowboarding. They have been a leader in high end specialty brands such as Ride, Spy, Rossignol, Volkl, and Spyder for over 27 years. They are proud to have their entire inventory, of brands previously not easily found on the internet, available online.
Rebel Board Sports is the newest member of the Retail Concepts family. This site focuses entirely on the boarding community and offers surf & skate apparel as well as gear and accessories for wakeboards, snowboards, and skateboards. The featured brands at this store include Burton, Element, Alien, Workshop, Liquid Force, Volcom, Reef, Billabong, and Fox. They already have a fast growing consumer base within the young boarding community which indicates that market has potential for tremendous growth. Plus, any affiliate who generates their first sale on Rebel Board Sports prior to 6/30/07 will receive a bonus 12% commission. Generate 3 sales by 8/31/07 and you ll receive an exclusive 20% off coupon good toward any item on the site!
The Retail Concepts affiliate program offers a 120 day cookie and a very competitive 8% commission with the opportunity to earn higher commissions in the VIP tier and affiliate bonuses. You will always be kept abreast of the hottest selling products and affiliate bonus offers in the monthly affiliate newsletter. Also, they are an auto deposit and auto approve merchant with an extensive creative inventory of banner and text links.
From the screen shot below, you can see the earning potential with this program. They currently have a 7 day EPC of $21.74 and a 30 day average order of $153.96. Even though this is a relatively young program, it is a steadily growing program.
In the chart below you can see that the 30 day average sale with this program has been hovering around the $150 mark. This is a program that offers a variety of big ticket items that convert well.
Retail Concepts offers free shipping on orders over $50 and also posts regular deals and discounts utilizing the ShareASale Deals Database. They also offer dynamic banners highlighting a featured product deal. These banners are updated regularly and are dynamic so you do not have to worry about manually updating your site as the deals change.
The Retail Concepts has a datafeed that features products from each of its stores. ShareASale s Make-A-Page tool can help you easily navigate the product feed to build exactly the storefront you wish to market. For example, I built the wakeboard page below in about 15 seconds utilizing the categories within the datafeed.
The The Retail Concepts affiliate program is managed by ShareASale s Client Services. If you have any questions about this program of if you would like some more information feel free to contact Sarah at Sarah@ShareASale.com or call 312.321.0487 x112
Make A Widget!
Today is one of those fun days… I get to introduce a brand new product/feature of the ShareASale Network. As with everything new, it might take some time to build up - so we are opening it up to all of the Merchants on the network first, so that they have time to fill in some content. We then have plans to open it up to Affiliates as soon as we can, hopefully as early as next week if there are a decent number of widgets created in the next few days.
Seeing how 2007 was declared to be the “Year of the Widget” by so many industry bloggers, we decided to make an easy-to-use interface enabling merchants on the ShareASale Network to create and maintain a variety of widgets for their affiliates. As is the custom with widgets, when a merchant updates the content of their widget, this information is updated in real-time (and without extra effort) to all of their affiliate’s websites.
So, the potential is great for very targetted and seasonal promotions. For example, if you have products that sell very well during the summer… you can include them in a “Summer” tab, and then replace that with an appropriate “Fall/Winter” tab later in the year. The affiliate would only have to load your widget once, and all other updates would be automatic.
Since creating a widget can be a little intimidating the first time, I’ve created a short video which explains the features of our “Make A Widget” tool, and shows a step-by-step walkthrough from start to finish which takes less than 10 minutes.
Enjoy! The videos are located here in full size, and a smaller size is available here.
We would love to help you make your first widget as well, so let us know if you need any assistance at all. Happy widget’ing!
