Codes Codes Codes
With the recent rush from retail sites to offer discount codes to every affiliate out there I thought I would outline how we have constructed a special CMS for our travel website, enabling us to aggregate both offers and codes from travel suppliers.
TravelPixel
Within the travel sphere, discount codes have been fairly slow to take hold. There are several reasons for this that I wont go into here but suffice to say we have seen an increase in our logs from people looking for special voucher codes for a % off at checkout. In addition to this we have also seen dubious ‘voucher sites’ claiming to offer codes for travel sites that do not exist, potentially ’stealing’ commission that could have come from us – a quality review driven website. In order to counteract this we have taken advantage of a database driven approach and a democratization of distribution where the upload and maintenance of product is concerned.
We maintain a backend of around 300 travel suppliers, each of which is automatically linked with various user reviews submitted onsite. This enables us to quickly provide relevant sites to visitors and increase our conversion rate. It also enabled us to build our new travel discount section.
Frameworks
Within the review framework within our CMS we have the reviews split into various categories of travel type. Examples of which may be ‘packages’, ‘hotels’ etc….When starting the discount section we used these categories in the same way to produce defined areas for each type of travel supplier – outlined below with examples:
Package Holiday Offers
- First Choice Discounts and Codes
- Lowcostholidays voucher codes
Villa Holiday Deals
- Villa Parade Discount Code
Accommodation & Hotel Deals
- Alpharooms Voucher Code
Flights Offers and Codes
- Virgin Atlantic Deals
Car Hire Discounts
- Holiday Autos Voucher Codes
Cruise and Ferry Deals
- DFDS Seaways Deals
Ski Holiday Offers
- Crystal Holidays specials
UK Holiday Deals
- Hoseasons Special Deals
Rail Travel Discounts
- Eurostar voucher Codes
Travel Insurance Deals
- Flexicover Deals
Luggage special offers
- Essentials4travel
Cheap Airport Parking Deals
- Resorthoppa Deals and Voucher Codes
Cheap Airport Transfers
- Holiday Taxis Deals
Holiday Attraction Deals
- Red Letter Days Voucher Code
As you can see above each category and specific merchant in that category is indexed by a number which also helps us when we come to apply mod rewrite to our urls.
Distribution
The task of harvesting all the possible offers online from every travel supplier we have listed would be a monumental task so we needed a scalable solution that would incentivise suppliers to do that task for us. To that end we constructed an interface for uploading offers or codes for merchants. Now some merchants or affiliate managers are more proactive than others so to start with we offer a general upload area where all types of offer can be uploaded but not edited. This was useful in getting many of the initial offers onsite but did leave something to be desired in terms of interaction from the merchant.
We then devised an interface for SPECIFIC merchants where they can add, edit or maintain their offers or codes on our site really easily. The only involvment we have is to approve offers (test links etc) and we then switch them on. Another point to mention is that we also try to insist on including deeplinks where possible to the appropriate offer landing page. This increases conversion.
The fact that we have all the merchants listed on a backend and connected to the public facing site allows us to instantly turn certain suppliers on or off – or delete them if they have been naughty. In addition we also rate the suppliers on the public side depending on how many LIVE offers they have onsite in a given period.
Additional aspects we are considering for the future include the ability to upload a CSV of offers (great for merchants if you have a load of deals to upload!), greater depth of description for offers and perhaps some sort of image upload to further enhance listings.