Rakuten Event: Affiliates, Cashrewards In-Store Offers, Hotelscombined Acquired, Honey + More

I got at a chance to attend a Rakuten event with Scotty recently. Rakuten is an affiliate company and they essentially work as the middle man between retailers and publishers.

Quite a few interesting attendees but for someone like myself who knows very little about how the industry work, it was a good insight. Generally retailers like BWS, Dell, Petbarn etc. have marketing campaigns where they offer bigger commisions to publishers to promote their products. Publishers can also negotiate with retailers. So Cashrewards or Shopback can ask a retailer to offer a higher commission which then gets passed on to the consumer as cashback. There was also some discussion of multiple attribution which splits commission with different parties. Have a read here and the complexity that it involves.

Some other interesting tidbits:

• Both CashRewards and ShopBack had stands located as far appart as possible on opposite ends of the room. :)

• Met with Cashrewards owners Andrew & Lorica Clarke. They had a stand set up with a beer pong table (minus the beer) where you had to land the ping pong ball in the cup to win prizes. Unfortunately, no TA in attendance. He can tell you where he was. :)

• Cashrewards will be rolling out in-store offers. Banner. Seems like it will be like American Express Statement credits or the Mastercard Rewards Deals. I guess you sign your VISA card up to the offer and then VISA communicate back to Cashrewards for the cashback. It's something other cashback sites do in other countries around the world so will be interesting to see this work.

• Dealmoon was in attendance. They are focussed on various country's Chinese speaking community and are set up in many places around the world. 2.5% of Australians speaking Chinese according to the ABS It's becoming more common with bargain sites such as Buenos Deals for example serving the Spanish speaking population of the US. Spanish is spoken by 13% of the population. The guy who works at Dealmoon Australia is a keen OzBargainer, maybe he'll say hi in this thread.

• BargainAvenue attended. These guys have been around for 10 years and remember checking their site quite often years ago.

• Buckscoop used to be the next biggest Australian bargain site. They pivoted a couple of years ago to write editorial content and are part of Upfeat Media who also own a some other deal editorial content sites like Momdeals and BargainMoose. As for Qwibble, that got bought by Pure Profile a few years ago who then shut it down for some reason.

• The Agoda rep was there and mentioned that they've recently acquired Hotelscombined, one of the best hotel comparison sites and originally founded in Sydney in 2005. Agoda is owned by Booking Holdings which owns Kayak, Priceline, Booking.com, momondo and a number of other sites. The other big player in the hotel business is Expedia Group who own Expedia, Hotels.com, Wotif and the other big hotel comparison site Trivago. All of this consolidating makes for less consumer choice IMO.

• We also met the guys from Honey. They are the browser extension which autofills coupons when you shop. There were several staff who had flown over from the US to attend this conference. Seems like they've raised $40 million and they are spending a bit of cash to expand into the Australian market. Having not played with Honey, I just assumed that they'll always get the affiliate click when using their extension. In fact, they have whitelisted all cashback sites so you can get cashback and use the coupon as well. It's fairly amazing that Honey has taken an existing model of coupon sites but added that 1 extra step to autofill coupons to become a huge multi-national company.

That's about all I can recall for now. Maybe some others who are involved in the retail/affiliate space can talk more about some of this stuff.