Matt Bailey’s affiliate blog

The rise of the iPhone, Android, Facebook, iGoogle etc has seen the increase of applications being developed to sit on disparate platforms. For example, Net-a-Porter have an excellent iPhone app which allows you to purchase their products direct from your iPhone.

So far the majority of these applications have been developed in house by the merchant themselves (in the case above, by the development team at Net-a-Porter. However, we are beginning to see more and more companies open up their API feed to allow 3rd party developers to utilise the original website data and interract with this data in new and exciting ways.

The theory is that the in house development team have limited resource, however by opening this up to an expansive open source community to allow them to develop applications on behalf of the merchant.

I’ll give two examples of how this could work and I’ll use Ocado as an example, for no reason other than I was just on their site. Firstly, a developer could use Ocado’s API to create a website that appeals to a specific niche. For example, a version of the Ocado site that is optimised for blind people or only contains products that can be eaten by people with a wheat allergy. This would allow the target groups to gain a better experience whilst tailored to them whilst being able to purchase Ocado products seamlessly.

Secondly, apps could be developed which interact with the consumer wherever they happen to be online, without having to navigate to the Ocado website. The obvious examples are having apps on platforms such as Facebook and the iPhone, whereby consumers can shop at Ocado whilst on the move or chatting on Facebook. There are also a few more interesting uses, such as integrating the app into a recipe site, having a pre-populated basket containing the ingredients required to make the recipe and purchase them direct from the recipe site.

There are a virtually limitless way of how apps can assist in making online experiences more efficient, but how does this relate to affiliate marketing you may ask? Well I think that there are some very clever ways that the CPA metric can be used to reward these developers. Out/open sourcing removed risk from the merchant but clearly developers aren’t going to create applications just for fun, they need to be rewarded somehow, and paying on a CPA seems the most logical way of doing this.

Sticking with our Ocado analogy, Ocado could pay the developer a percentage for every item added to the basket and/or subsequently purchased. This approach enables a risk free way for the merchant to encourage developers not only to develop apps, but also to distribute them as widely as possible.

So will this become the next iteration of the affiliate model? We’ve moved from content to PPC to cashback to voucher code, and have so far managed to find a place for all. Will “developer affiliates” sit alongside others in the mix and prove a catalyst for merchants to become increasingly aimed towards CPA for their online acquisition activity?