85% of merchants that have an affiliate promotional code expiring on or before 30th September have not announced a replacement code for October.

Some merchants are particularly good at running several discount code promotions at the same time. There are some that do overlapping promotions with different end dates. For a discount code site like mine that means that merchant is always featured.

For those 39 merchants that have a code expiring on the last day of the month, why haven’t you already announced next months promotional code? Devoted to Sport and Historic Newspapers have already sent out details of their 10% discount code starting 1st October.

By leaving it until your existing code has already expired, you run the risk of losing your placement on key promotional pages. I’ve had lots of visitors on my site searching for Debenhams codes but that was sadly during the two week window that there wasn’t any code to promote.

After this weekend I’ll be doing mild or no updates to my Shop Codes site for two weeks. I’m taking my laptop with me on my Hong Kong holiday but only to deal with emergencies and I’ve had plenty of them this September.

This week I have pro-actively emailed over 20 merchants and affiliate managers for extensions to my existing Exclusive codes. That has proved very successful with 17 already extending the code either by one month, to the end of the year and some are now even valid well into 2008.

So merchants, if you’re saving sending out your promotional emails and codes until October. Just send it now and I can continue to promote you. You can always send another in a weeks time.

Personally I’d like to see merchants providing rolling codes so that I can provide a seamless service. i.e. at the start of the month announce a code that lasts four weeks and then mid-month, provide another code that lasts four weeks.

Some merchants are providing the mid-month codes as I can testify with this busy week. However, they’re sticking to the non-imaginative expiry date of 30th/31st of the month.

My thanks go to those 17 merchants. These are the ones I’ll be pushing on my Shop Codes home page, while I take a break and shoppers will be searching for discounts.