Hi all :)
I have been looking into starting a cashback site for New Zealanders, mainly after seeing the popularity of the sites in Australia. I believe it would be possible, and I was looking for feedback from Cheapies members before going ahead with anything.
Main Questions:
Cheers.
Thanks for the feedback! :) Much appreciated.
It's more just an idea than anything at the moment, and I don't have the time to look at it properly until the end of the year. (always get time-consuming ideas when I have the least time lol). I agree about the Trademe and Warehouse, if you go them on board you'd be set :).
Thanks
Providing support is definitely the most time consuming part of a cashback site. It pretty much involves being the middle man between your customers and the affiliate networks (who are again middle man between you and the advertisers or media agencies).
You basically do not just go to the merchant to ask them whether they'll support a cashback site. Look around the merchants in NZ that actually do affiliate marketing, you'll find most of them are actually using Australian and international networks. As far as I know neither Trademe nor The Warehouse are on any affiliate network.
There's also a range of difficulties, depending on how competent you are developing an automated backend to reconcile transaction feeds from various affiliate network and your click-logs.
Easiest: Partner with some white-labels. Since the similarity between Australian and New Zealand retailers, you might want to look at ShopGo (powers CashRewards.com.au) and RewardsHere (affiliated with PricePal). They provide white-label solutions for big companies to run their own cashback sites for their employees. Those providers already have relationships with affiliate networks and merchants so less things to worry about.
There are also some cheap scripts that you can buy. Cashback Engine and other EBates clones. You'll need to organise your own hosting, apply to different affiliate networks and then talk to various merchants etc to get onto their programs. Those scripts should hopefully take care of the automated reconciliation.
Code your own.
Thanks for the feedback and the extra info Scotty! I will look into those links when I have a bit more time. :) I agree that support would be the most time consuming part, so I'd need to look into that as well.
Cheers again.
We have discussed the idea in the past, but it was not something we had the hours required to manage.
Keep in mind that there will be a lot of support required, there would be a huge amount of transaction based issues that you'd need to provide support on and assist with.
In saying that, if you are able to get a bunch of decent retailers on board, then I'd happily sign up and use it if needed. I know Air NZ and AA have close-to-cashback systems offering points/discounts instead of cash, so giving a better rate/experience than them would be a minimum.
Maybe an interesting one to try and get on board could be Trademe. I know Ebay do a lot of cashback overseas, so maybe pitch it that way to them, but good luck getting into contact with anyone who is even wanting to discuss it. The Warehouse might be another one. Plenty of retailers that could be worth contacting, but good luck getting in contact with the right person.
If the idea gets off the ground, happy to help with testing as well, and I'm sure others here would be too.