Our first post on Shopify Collabs argued that people have flocked to the platform because of Shopify’s market share rather than the quality of what it offers. In this post, we highlight the flipside of the coin of running successful campaigns: saving our clients money. We excel at catching mistakes in the programs we inherit, increasing ROAS, and making the flashy side of the coin shine that much brighter.
I. The Coupon Debacle of 2023
This past year, we picked up management of a well-established program for a global, well-known DTC brand. They joined Collabs under the guidance of their previous agency, who either failed to notice or ignored issues in the way coupons were being handled in Collabs.
During an audit of the top coupons in the program, we discovered that Collabs partner discount codes were getting picked up by discount and loyalty sites on Rakuten. These coupons could’ve been leaked, scraped, or some combination thereof.
This double-dipping was not captured by Rakuten’s reporting because they were Collabs codes, nor in Collabs, due to the limited reporting we’ve criticized them for here. This was hurting the ROAS of both programs.
II. Increasing ROAS Without Losing Revenue
Our first move was to make the Collabs codes non-commissionable within Rakuten. This prevented double payment but it wasn’t a good long term solution. For as long as the codes were leaked, it would harm the affiliate program’s EPC, hurting recruitment of new publishers. To solve sustainably, we lowered the percentage offered to the consumers in the Collabs codes.
We got some pushback from publishers when they suddenly lost their free money, but those payouts hadn’t been earned. Lowering the percentage prevented the codes from being used more than authorized affiliate codes even when they were leaked, saving the client money without sacrificing revenue.
III. The Bottom Line
When agencies are compensated based solely on commissions paid to affiliates, they have zero incentive to correct such errors. Increasing ROAS means more money for other strategic initiatives, higher commissions and draw. There is no reason why brands should be paying twice for the same sale.
Troubleshooting promo codes is essential in Shopify Collabs because attribution overlaps are common. The bottom line: be careful any time you are running multi-network, above all when coupon codes are involved.
