IFEYINWA CHIGOZIE OKOLI
MKT 6334.501-DIGITAL SALES STRATEGY
ASSIGNMENT- REVENUEWIRE.COM
1) How does Revenue Wire compare to its competitors in its two chosen arenas (affiliate network management and online shopping carts)?
Revenue wire Compares to its competitors in its two chosen arenas.
Affiliate network Management. After three years of rapid growth in a relatively young industry, the affiliate and payment processing company RevenueWire.com found itself operating in a very different environment. Sales growth in the company's affiliate network service had levelled off, and orders for Q1 2010 looked just like those for Q1 2009. New competitors, low entry barriers, and a plateau in the affiliate market meant few opportunities for growth across the industry. Despite those conditions, the company's owners had set aggressive revenue targets for 2010 to 2012. The general manager was responsible for growing RevenueWire’s network by helping affiliates increase sales and make more money. She was also charged with building merchant business: that meant signing on new merchants and convincing merchants to use RevenueWire as an end-to-end solution from finding affiliates to delivering an effective shopping cart and payment experience.
In order to increase revenue leach identified two approaches:
1) More of the same : continue to concentrate on the “pay per sale” model of the affiliate network provider. Growth in this area would mean signing on more affiliates and representing a broader range of products from more merchants.
2)Platform as a service: Market its proprietary SafeCart as a standalone product and end new investment in the affiliate’s network business. Each approach meant a different level of investment, effort and return. The general manager was responsible for growing RevenueWire’s network by helping affiliates increase sales and make more money.
The Affiliate Marketing Revenue Model: This model used agent to generate customer for a merchant. Amazon started started the first affiliates program in 1996 with its “Amazon Associate Program” The individual and companies that registered with Amazon earned commissions as high as 15 per cent by referring buyers from the associate site to Amazon. If the referral resulted in a sale, the referring received a commission from Amason.com. Amazon claim to have more than 900,000 participants. There were two factors to success as an affiliate: Volume of referrals and conversion of those referrals into buyers. The more the referrals an affiliates produced and higher the quality.( ie the stronger the intentions of the reffered customer to actually buy) the more money the affiliate earned. Amazon provided enough products that an affiliate could earn a satisfying income just by being associated with the Single merchant. However, most merchants offered a more limited range of product and affiliates marketers promoted the products of many merchants.
RevenueWire competed in the arena where smaller merchants with few products relied on affiliate networks to connect to interested agents and manage the relationships with them. RevenueWire act as network manager, their business model connect merchants of digital products, such as security and utility software, with affiliates looking for profitable products to promote. RevenueWire supported its network by vetting both merchants and affiliates, tracking referrals and commissions, providing a fully integrated shopping cart/payment options and providing a reliable platform on which to operate.
Affiliate marketing was based on a pay- per-performance model. Merchants only paid commission on actual sales- no sales meant no selling expense. High-quality affiliates were, in essence a sale force with no fixed costs. Also merchants could increase revenues and off set commission cost by up-selling during the checkout process. The merchant could also gain permission to further market and its partners. Many payment processors disclosed customer information to both the merchant and affiliate: RevenueWire Only disclosed customer information to the merchant. This gave the merchant “ownership” of the customer and their future purchases. It also prevented customers from being bombarded with marketing by both merchant and affiliate.
RevenueWire uses cookies and other digital devices to track subsequent actions. Prospects who clicked on a landing page offer were taken to the RevenueWire server to complete the transaction and trigger a tracking cookie. Once the customer decided to purchase the product, he or she did so through RevenueWire’s integrated shopping cart, called SafeCart . SafeCart allowed RevenueWire to manage the complete affiliate transaction from end to end, and all traffic driven from affiliates was processed through the cart. An affiliate network without an integrated cart and payment processing had to turn the transaction to another company at the point of checkout. Through SafeCart, RevenueWire could collect the transition payment, take its fees and distribute the remainder according to the commission agreement between the merchant and the affiliate.
RevenueWire mainly competed against large public companies that had grown by acquiring RevenueWire’s smaller competitors. Those Companies includes Digital River’s, OneNetworkDirect, ClickBank and Commission Junction had money to market widely and competes to acquire competititors whenever there is an opportunity.
OneNetworkDirection(OND) was RevenueWire’s primary competition, it parent company Digital, River earned more than $404 million in revenue in fiscal 2009 by offering a vast array of services for software and high tech product including online marketing program management, fraud screening, customer service optimazation and online store management. It had 1,000 employees, 40,000 merchants such as Microsoft and Sony, and Offices in America,Asia and Europe. They had grown aggressive acquisition, with goal of being an end to end solution from digital marketing. They were generating more than $10,000 per month and merchants with a minimum of $50,000 in sales per month; they served more than 70,000 affiliates and offered big-name software products from companies such as Symantec Corporation, Adobe, Microsoft and PC Tools.
Click bank managed 110,000 affiliate and 70,000 digital product publishers, producing approximately 27,000 orders per day in some countries. They focused on a mass market approach; they accepted any interested any interested merchants and products.
Commission Junction launched in 1998 was a division of ValueClick,Inc. Commission Junction had $58.1 million in revenue, up from $54 million in the first half of 2009. It worked with a leading retailer; including more than 60 per cent of the 2010 Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide that used third-party affiliates networks. Commission Junction was involved in search engine marketing in order to optimize the sales of it network partners.
RevenueWire attempted to attract affiliates by providing a proprietary commission tracking technology which it claimed was the most reliable available. High commission, access to high-demand products, and regular payments in various currencies were also offered to affiliates in the RevenueWire network.
Online Shopping Cart.
Established players in the shopping cart industry differentiated themselves on price, levels of customization and comprehensiveness of the package offered. The main competitors, Plimus, Cleverbridge and Avangate, were privately owned, with a primary focus on their shopping cart platforms. Shopping cart clients, primarily vendors selling software products.
RevenueWire would operate expected carts that offered multiple languages, payment methods and currencies; worked in the affiliate market space; and specialized in digital products. Only a few shopping cart providers met those expectations. Revenuewire, if it proceeded with its Carts modifications, would compete against those few companies.
Plimus had more than 5,000 vendor and more than 50,000 affiliates. They were internationally applicable with 18 payment currencies and 20 languages.
Cleverbridge provided an e-commerce platform that could accept 23 different payment currencies and processing in 21 languages, they offered management application, the commerce Assistant which track users data and provided real-time reports.

2) Based on the information in the case, what would you recommend to Leach and why?
The general manager must evaluate options for growth, including new markets and new products, to determine how to meet her targets. Because RevenueWire.com's competitors are privately held, there is little public data on the state of their finances or the size of various markets. The general manager has learned how to use surrogate data to gauge the market and make strategic decisions. The general manager was responsible for growing RevenueWire’s network by helping affiliates increase sales and make more money. She was also charged with building merchant business: that meant signing on new merchants and convincing merchants to use RevenueWire as an end-to-end solution from finding affiliates to delivering an effective shopping cart and payment experience.
RevenueWire processed an average of 10,000 orders per day from its affiliate network. But he niche was not without challenges. Leach describes the driver and registry vrticals or product segments as highly competitive. Every product in those segment was already represented by many affiliates and it was difficult to generate new sales.
I would recommend selling the SafeCart platform as a service though it required addictional investment of time, money and staff. The current system that RevenueWire had was built for efficiency, not flexibility as a result, functions wre tightly intergrated with one another. It was impossible to pick and choose from the features of the system; a merchant got all of the features or none.
Based on the case I would also Platform as a service: Under option B, traffic would originate in Safecart. The merchant company would receive a SafeCart shopping cart that could be customized with the merchants’s branding and integrated into the merchant’s site, as well as being optimized to reduce abandonment during payment and checkout. The cart could be multilingual, allowed volume discounts, and displayed prices( as well as processed payments. In US dollar, Canadian dollars, euro ot British Pounds. The typical fee include a variable component that ranged from three to per cent of the sales transaction plus a fixed fee that ranged from $0 to $1.00 per transaction

3)(Optional) Based on your own research, what, if any, other verticals or products would you recommend RevenueWire explore as new sources of revenue and why?
I recommend vertical Desktop enhancement because of the Global monthly Searches.
I recommend ebook because of the Global monthly searches is 10,886,000
I will recommend Games example Youda Games the Global Monthly searches is 10, 192,000