07 Jul 10 Canadian Tire closes their online affiliate program – will CanadianTire.ca survive ?
Well, less than 18 months after Canadian Tire essentially closed their online store, they’ve now officially announced the demise of their affiliate program. The affiliate program was initially designed for webmasters to make a commission on sales generated by driving visitors to the CT online store to make purchases. Once the online store was essentially closed, the affiliate program languished on – albeit it was pretty much to reward webmasters who sent visitors that bought CT gift cards; which are one of the few products they now sell online.
I ran campaigns on several client sites pointing traffic to the Canadian Tire site, and I’m also (like any real Canadian) a big fan of Canadian Tire, so I’m a bit saddened to see them backing away even further from the online world as far as eCommerce goes. Perhaps they just figured out that their core clientele preferred the fun of shopping in their bricks and mortar outlets. That, or the prohibitive cost of offering reasonable shipping rates given the weight and volume of most products they sell outweighed the expanded marketplace.
Here’s the official news we received:
Dear Robin Majumdar,
Please be advised that Canadian Tire has decided to discontinue their affiliate program. We would like to thank you for all of your hard work and dedication over the years to the Canadian Tire affiliate program. As of JULY 31st 2010 activity will no longer be tracked through Linkshare for the Canadian Tire affiliate program and the Canadian Tire affiliate agreement with you will expire.
PLEASE REMOVE ALL CANADIAN TIRE CREATIVE supplied through Linkshare including text links, banners, data feeds, or any other type of Linkshare link for the Canadian Tire affiliate program by July 31st 2010. After this date, links will no longer track or land on their intended landing pages.
Canadian Tire will not be transitioning their affiliate program to another network. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Thank you,
Tim Mueller (Linkshare) and The Canadian Tire Affiliate Team
Note the final quote about not transition to another network (from Linkshare) which pretty much drives a nail into the online venture for Canadian Tire – for now. The question that remains… how much longer will CanadianTire.ca. continue to exist – and in what form?
Tags: affiliate programs, Canadian Tire, LinkShare, Monetization
13 Jan 09 US Search affiliate program leaves LinkShare for Commission Junction
I’ve been keeping track of advertisers who manage their affiliate programs through the various networks such as Google Affiliate Network, Commission Junction and LinkShare amongst others and we just received official notice from Amy Harrin that the venerable online background investigation company US Search is moving from Linkshare to Commission Junction effective January 15th… (this Thursday!)… Amy is the dedicated affiliate manager at US Search.
US Search is pretty one of the top tier online services to do background checks (from about $5 per search, depending how much detail you are looking for) on people – it’s pretty popular amongst people wanting to check out potential dates on the online social networking and dating sites.
We manage programs under both CJ and LinkShare and I highly prefer CJ – for the unique and simple reason that the user interface on Linkshare (parent company Rakuten) is consistenly sluggish and slow and a bit too annoying to easily navigate. That being said, Linkshare has a very high quality roster of advertisers and you simply cannot ignore them in your monetization strategy. Just be ready to sit waiting for report updates (in Flash) to generate. It’s not that CJ is that much better – but faster enough to merit more frequent visits to check on performance reports.
So US Search will be live on CJ as of January 15th – here’s the official notice all US Search Linkshare partners received:
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Tags: affiliate programs, Amy Harrin, Commission Junction, LinkShare, Monetization, US Search
