Tips & Guides — 23 Aug 2022
Benefits of eCommerce Partnerships
An online store that reached particular highs and for months brought the same revenue still might grow even bigger. One of the ways to progress for a successful eCommerce business is through partnerships.
Global place with 500+ brands and networks built to expand your partnerships and accelerate business growth
Learn more →Partnerships allow even such strong brands like TikTok and Shopify to continue to expand their audiences and influence. Last year these two brands announced their partnership. Thanks to that, Shopify-based businesses can natively embed their commerce at one of the most prominent and active online communities. According to TikTok, around half of their users find new products within the social network.
So, shall you partner your eCommerce business with a well-known brand? Maybe. Partner with influencers, publishers, or other affiliates? Ok. Partner with other eCommerce businesses? Probably. Though the last one raises the most concerns. However, even relationships between two contiguous retailers could be thriving for both parties. So, let’s figure out all benefits of different eCommerce partnerships.
By establishing partnerships with other online stores, which are not your primary competitors, you provide your customers with more choice. More choice means more time and money spent in your store.
A great example of how to thrive on eCommerce partnerships even during challenging business periods is the leading fashion retailer Nordstrom. Due to the lockdown caused by COVID-19, people were less likely to leave their homes. So, Nordstrom made some partnering deals with various retailers specialized in selling home products. The benefit of these partnerships was a high range of different goods that a person can buy in one place while also saving money on the delivery. It helped to keep their existing clients and possibly attract new customers.
Very likely, your online store already has a large audience and constant traffic. Is this your limit, though? If you haven’t tried partner marketing yet, probably not.
Let’s picture that you are selling natural cosmetics, and your target audience is young women. What else can young women who prefer natural cosmetics be interested in? Let’s say they often order healthy food from one of the store chains. It’s your audience, but they might never know about your product if you didn’t partner with this health food supplier. Or with some other company that provides natural and healthy products for women.
Partnerships, of course, imply that they must be beneficial for both parties. Even if you are not in the top 100 eCommerce companies, it doesn’t matter. Partnering with you can still be of interest to other well-established brands, and you can get the trust of their loyal audience in return.
One of the examples of such a case is the marketing strategy of furniture retailer West Elm. Recently, they have entered into partnerships with smaller Direct-to-Customer companies, such as cookware maker Caraway and high-end puzzle brand Piecework Puzzles. Thus, West Elm helps smaller brands to breakthrough, whilst creating various proposals and original styles for themselves.
Another simple example of how you can gain trust is to enter into a partnership with the industry giant, Amazon. For placing your product in the Amazon catalog you are expected to promote some other Amazon products across your market. Yet, in return, you get some credit from the most extensive loyal customer base, stable ordering process, and worldwide customer service.
And here, we smoothly move to the fact that partnerships also allow you to share marketing experience, strategies, resources, and creatives, as well as workforce and talent. Since partner marketing implies a mutually beneficial business relationship, then mutual assistance is of no exception.
We have already mentioned an example of resources the partnership with Amazon can offer. However, marketing relationships can involve so much more:
These are far from all activities that you can share with your eCommerce partners. You could even share customer service agents, for example, and include international calling at a reduced fee for customers calling from other countries. More importantly, all of this can be very efficient and easily traceable.
With the help of existing technologies, it’s easy to track the performance of eCommerce partnerships. One of the technological solutions for this is a performance marketing platform. The concept of performance marketing implies tracking sales at all stages, monitoring the quality of marketing partnerships, changes in ROI, and much more.
It’s vital to have a reliable technological solution for successful eCommerce partnerships. Perhaps the most effective option would be a partner marketing SaaS platform that already meets all industry standards and your business needs.
A strong analytics capability of partnership management software is one of the most important features for eCommerce partner programs. You need a smart tool that will help you analyze effectiveness of ad campaigns and different traffic sources.
eCommerce is an industry with its specifics. The software stack will provide online retailing businesses with all the necessary tools to configure their partnerships following all these requests.
A ready-made partner management platform could make the process of creating and managing partnerships much more straightforward with automation tools, CPAPI offer transfer, ad fraud control, and integrations specific for eCommerce.
Written by
Affise Academy
Affise is a partner marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to scale via all possible performance marketing channels. Synergy of technology and our long standing experience lets you expand your partnerships, automate every step of the campaign lifecycle and make data-driven decisions.
See all articles →Stay on top of the competition. Let us keep you updated with news, insights, and more
