I had a lot of time for Thomson Holidays. The high street travel retailer has jumped into the Top 10 of Hitwise’s Quarterly Hot Shops List.

Meanwhile their affiliate scheme has been Cold for six months.

In November I received a personal email from Peter Norwood saying that they will no longer be giving out exclusive discount codes to affiliates.

“I obviously hope you can continue to promote Thomson but appreciate we’re moving away from your model somewhat!”

That’s all fair Peter but what you didn’t actually go on to say was that you were reducing commissions to £5 without notification.

You did reply to a post on the A4uforum on 11th November:

“Yes we’ve made a decision to reduce what we pay to cashback and voucher code sites, we’re doing this during November and December and will reassess ahead of the January peak in bookings.

Apologies for the email not going out yet.”

It’s now March and I and other affiliates are still waiting for that first email!

As a voucher code site owner that hasn’t promoted your brand with the use of a voucher code since 31st October 2007, why should I receive less commission than someone who runs a blog?

During 2007 I received over £1,000 commission from promoting Thomson Holidays with an Exclusive code. Now I would have to generate 200 sales to receive that amount.

For a £2,516.38 sale where I once made £50.33 commission, I now only receive £5. That’s less than one tenth of what I once received. How can you justify that?

I made a sale of £2,750 just yesterday. So that is approximately 0.18% commission.

Sadly for me Thomson Holidays is my fourth most visited merchants page. Like some other affiliates I may have to look at other methods of monetising this popular page.

Last night a friend and colleague of mine purchased a Hotpoint AQXXF149P Washing Machine from Sainsbury’s Kitchen. He did it via my ShopCodes tracking link, not to receive a discount (as there isn’t any) but so that I could receive the commission.

This morning he asked me if the sale tracked and I said yes and showed him that I made one Sainsbury’s Kitchen sale at 20:40.

He was surprised to see this as he had spent a lot more than the price listed on the Affiliate Window Transaction Breakdown Report screen which shows a pending sale of £244.26 with a 2% commission of £4.89.

He spent £287.00 on the washing machine, plus a further £12.99 for disposal of his existing appliance and delivery at £19.99. His total outlay was £319.98.

In his email order summary it does say that the VAT element included in the Total price is £47.66.

I’ve tried to do the maths but I can’t quite figure out why it says £244.26 within Affiliate Window and not £287.00.

My best performing merchant ever is leaving the Commission Junction network this month.

I started promoting JD Williams from 2nd October 2006. It is no coincidence that my Shop Codes traffic and commissions subsequently grew exponentially from this time.

Promoting the JD Williams brand, which is an umbrella network of approximately 25 mail order catalogue sites, was a masterstroke, with its combination of new customer discounts and free gift promotional codes.

JD Williams split those brands across two affiliate networks, CJ and DGM. They include websites such as Simply Be, Crazy Clearance, VivaLaDiva, Christmas Gifts Direct, Autumn Clearance, PremierMan, House of Bath, Summer Clearance, …

With budget restraints JD Williams have now had to consolidate their affiliate programs down to one network. It’s not been reported which, if any, will transfer over. Assuming DGM will remain their one network.

I found an email I sent just 6 weeks after signing-up, dated 17th November 2006, to the then affiliate manager. It began:

“My promotion of JD Williams this Christmas on both the CJ network and DGM has been very successful this November.

“I have generated £14,800 sales on the CJ network with a further £9,134 on the DGM network, totalling £24,000.”

Now, looking back, that is remarkable. I have to stress all of these sales were from organic SEO traffic and not Pay-Per-Click. I know because my site was appearing as the number one result for key search phrases.

In fact my initial email was to ask if I could brand bid on PPC because I knew if I were to lose that good organic ranking, I’d lose nice commissions overnight. We didn’t follow that up as the sales continued right up to Christmas.

In the first 5 months of promoting JD Williams, I generated £95,000 worth of sales on the CJ network alone. With that I surpassed a JD Williams set target and in early 2007 received a £1,250 cash bonus as a performance incentive.

2007 and this Christmas was just as strong.

JD Williams on CJ, you shall be missed. This will leave a big big hole in my CJ statistics. There are only a couple of merchants exclusively on that network now that are still worth promoting.

The Independent reported that the first day following the first weekend of December, nicknamed ‘Mega Monday’, was going to see millions of shoppers online. The day was hyped to replace the last Saturday before Christmas as the vital day for gift shopping.

Over at the back-bedroom of Shop Codes towers I suspected that Monday was going to be a good profitable day. The signs were there. I’d spent the weekend not only removing all of November’s expired codes but adding a further 45 new ones to the mix. So the site was full of valid promotional codes and fresh content.

Sunday’s traffic was high too with an extra 266 unique visitors compared to Saturday.

So did ‘Mega Monday’ live up to the hype? Oh yes!

• RECORD NUMBER OF UNIQUE VISITORS: An extra 158 visitors arrived on the site compared to Sunday. There were also an extra 296 more visitors than the previous Monday, which itself was a good day as it was many people’s pay day.

• RECORD NUMBER OF REPEAT VISITORS: I take a lot of joy knowing that my repeat visitor numbers are climbing. I try to ensure that every code that is published on Shop Codes is valid and I test the majority myself. I also don’t imply that there is a code, if there isn’t. I believe users will trust the site more. On Monday I had more repeat visitors than I had total unique visitors during 11th August 2007.

• RECORD NUMBER OF PAGE VIEWS: An extra 727 pages were viewed from the previous day and this was an increase on 599 from the previous Monday. With Shop Codes converting at 37% for some merchants, the more pages viewed the better.

• RECORD NUMBER OF DAILY SALES FOR ONE MERCHANT. My most visited merchant’s page converts at a staggering 37%. With a high commission of £32.99 and a low of £0.48.

• RECORD TOTAL OF COMMISSION: So with more unique visitors, repeat visitors, page views and a high conversion rate, how MEGA was ‘MEGA’? Well, I can confirm it was the highest commission day ever for Shop Codes. I was impressed with Sunday’s total and I received £240 more commission.

• COME ON! HOW MEGA? For those that know me, or those who just want to guess, I received 8 times more commission in one day than what I receive for a days work in my full time employment. (And no, I’m not on minimum wage.) Considering that I only spent one hour updating the site on the Monday, that’s one fantastic hourly rate. Mega even!

Question is, so what do we call the Tuesday following ‘Mega Monday’. ‘Teasing…’, ‘Tiny…’, ‘Tortuous’?