Reducing Costs for High-End Affiliate Comparison Sites

March 8, 2013 - PRLog -- Affiliate Networking sites such as ShopStyle employ 80people in various capacities to run their international comparison sites costing an estimated $2.4million in employees alone. These sites must process 100s thousands to millions of products from data aggregators and direct retailers on a daily basis updating new products, special offers and removing old products from the system.

There are three core areas in any IT system with key components specific to affiliate sites.

Technical Infrastructure & Software
- Downloading datasets from aggregators and retailers
- Automated mapping of the datasets
- Automated data cleansing
- High performance processing

Cross Business/Technical Management
- Adding new mappings including brands & retailers
- Adding new categories and mapping retailer categories
- Monitoring data quality
- Manual data adjustments
- Managing technical feasibility against business requirements

Business Management
- Marketing & social networking
- SEO & keyword analysis
- Banner & image management


The level of Technical & Cross Business/Technical data processing required for affiliate sites is normally only found in enterprise companies which is the reason these sites are built incrementally over years to custom design the infrastructure. One of the key problems with any solution is data mapping, on a daily basis the complete dataset must be remapped and checked for changes, cleaned and reformatted in to the target website format for display to visitors.

This process is very computing and labour intensive constantly updating datasets for changed records, caching images, providing an infrastructure to add new brands and categories, managing the mapping from retailer categories to site categories, and more.

Vanquish Consulting have taken a revolutionary approach to the problem, rather than building a solution from the ground-up, they have taken enterprise principles and infrastructure scaling this to the SME market allowing them to implement solutions for affiliate networking that can process up to millions of products per day whilst reducing employee headcounts by 50-90%.

There are two versions of their Industry Solution for Affiliates, ETL and MDM. The ETL version is designed for affiliate networking and provides a slightly more technical infrastructure to manage and maintain mappings, datasets and processing to frontend websites. The ETL version requires substantially reduced server resources and can be implemented in under one month providing fast time to market and reducing employee headcounts by up to 80%.

The MDM solution uses an web based intermediary product management tool before loading the data to the frontend website. This allows faster and purely business orientated product management including graphical drag-and-drop of mappings, inline image editing, manual data enrichment & modification, version control, and more. The MDM version requires substantially increased server resources due to its graphical nature including separate batch, master and web server, however implementation can still be achieved in less than two months and reduces employee headcounts by up to 90%.

These tools allow SMEs to compete against the largest websites on the internet with time to market in months instead of years and substantially reduced employee headcounts. Implementing an equivalent international site to ShopStyle would require 16 employees for the ETL version and only 8 employees for the MDM version to manage the Mappings, Data Quality, and Business aspects of the site reducing employee costs by up to $2million yearly. Ultimately this leads to increased profits and the ability to change to market conditions much more rapidly than existing ground-up implementations.

For further information regarding the Industry Solution for Affiliates (ETL) or  Industry Solution for Affiliates (MDM) contact solutions@vanquishconsulting.com.