In my recent Cratejoy Marketplace Update post a couple weeks ago I briefly mentioned how we’ve been partnering with affiliates to help us drive new potential customers to the Cratejoy Marketplace.
Since then, I’ve received a few questions from our sellers asking for details on how this works and what our future plans are for what we like to call the ‘Marketplace Partner Program’.
What are we doing?
We’ve partnered with a select group of websites that focus specifically on subscription boxes to help us drive more attention to Cratejoy businesses. These websites earn most of their revenue through affiliate commission partnerships and have painstakingly had to manage each of their hundreds of relationships individually. Things like getting paid and working with dozens of different affiliate tracking apps quickly add up to become a pretty large monthly task for them!
Partnering with Cratejoy has been a natural fit for these websites. Internally we have the ability to track purchases from the marketplace across our hundreds of subscriptions. Our marketplace partners get one convenient tracking link (they use these tracking links as the URL’s the link to your listing in the marketplace) and one big check containing all their commissions across different Cratejoy subscriptions each month.
How does it benefit our sellers?
For Cratejoy sellers, this means you don’t have to worry about structuring an affiliate deal with each subscription box blogger. We negotiate the commission amounts, take care of payments, reporting and more – making it a completely seamless process, it’s another thing you don’t have to worry about at Cratejoy.
Keep in mind, this shouldn’t be thought of as the end all be all to your affiliate efforts. We’re just taking care of the subscription box niche. We encourage everyone to focus their affiliate and strategic partnership efforts on bloggers, personalities and websites that are more closely aligned with your niche. While the Cratejoy platform doesn’t have a built-in affiliate app yet, we’re totally compatible with third party apps like ShareaSale and Commission Junction (used to run your own affiliate program).
Who’s paying the subscription box affiliates?
Currently, as this has been a test, Cratejoy has been paying all the affiliate commissions out of pocket. Eventually as the Marketplace Partner Program becomes more established, we will find a way to make it sustainable by charging a commission on customers from the marketplace, but right now we’re focused on making it as powerful as we can!
What will this look like in the future?
In the future, we’ll be developing a seamless way to approve or deny free box review requests from subscription box bloggers. You’ll be able to quickly see how that blogger has performed for you in the past and make a decision on whether or not to include a box for them in your next monthly shipment. We’ll also be working on making it easy to communicate with each affiliate partner to organize unique promotions like giveaways or special offers.
As we continue to develop these features in the Cratejoy Marketplace, your feedback is extremely valuable. Please comment with your thoughts, concerns or ideas!
