Linkshare Raises the Coupon Bar With an API

Coupons are a pretty big deal these days (understatement of the year).

Even the Schaffer brothers Steve and Howard got their own Offers.com mentioned in a TechCrunch article yesterday. Techcrunch covering a coupon site? Really? There’s the power of a great domain name. And Steve’s ability to get press. Well done guys.

In a timely fashion for this holiday season, yesterday, Linkshare announced a new coupon API for their affiliate publishers.

To sign up for their coupon API, go into the Web Services section of the Publisher Dashboard:

Coupon and promotion management is one feature that has never seemed to evolve to its potential in the affiliate space. At first glance, this one seems to be up there in functionality.

I was chatting with fellow publisher Michael Coley of Amazing-Bargains.com recently about network coupon solutions and reminiscing about the old Be Free Offer Management system, which I affectionately refer to as the industry’s best coupon management system to ever land in the trash heap.

*sigh*

It had features AND an editorial process that enforced quality.

The Wildcard is Data Quality

Lest we get too excited. Everything hinges on data quality.

Merchants can sometimes get overzealous with what they put into a coupon management system and without good policies and enforcement, the whole thing could be useless. That’s worth highlighting.

Merchants tend to push the limits of what constitutes an “offer” and “coupon” just to get their products out there. My favorite was one that we rejected in the old Be Free days that went something like this, “Send your Thanksgiving cards with Stamps from stamps.com.” There were dozens of them. Seriously.

Data quality within fields is critical as well.

For example, with a single offer description field, merchants may try to put a lot of information in there. But publishers need that plus a short title. With only one description field, most publishers will need to hand-manage this data before it can be included on a website.

Offer restrictions is an area that can get complicated as well, and without good structure around how these are specified, it will unlikely be formatted in a way that can be easily automated. For example, many advertisers have restrictions on certain product Ids or brands. If this is written in plain text, it can easily be included in the offer presented to the user. But if I have an advanced coupon system and want to not even show coupons for the products it doesn’t apply to, there may be manual work involved in handling the coupons.

I’m glad to see new solutions appear that address some of the major pain points of offer management. At a first glance, this one appears to have many of the critical elements that have been lacking. If you like to geek out on API stuff, here are the juicy details…

Features

REST based

Linkshare’s APIs are a REST-based Web Service. You make a simple API call with a single URL with several name-value pairs in it. As far as web services go, this is about as simple as it gets. You’ll need to be able to deal with XML, which falls in the “advanced web develeopment” category.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<couponfeed>
  <link type="TEXT">
    <categories>
      <category id="983">computers</category>
      <category id="12">electronics</category>
      <category id="14">gifts</category>
    </categories>
  <promotiontypes>
    <promotiontype id="22">percentage off</promotiontype>
  </promotiontypes>
  <offerdescription>15 percent off</offerdescription>
  <offerstartdate>2009-04-01</offerstartdate>
  <offerenddate>2009-05-31</offerenddate>
  <couponcode>KJEISLD</couponcode>
  <couponrestriction>New Customers Only</couponrestriction>
  <clickurl>http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=XXXXXXXXXXX&offerid=164317.10002595&type=4&subid=0</clickurl>
  <impressionpixel>http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=XXXXXXXXXXX&bids=164317.10002595&type=4&subid=0<impressionpixel>
  <advertiserid>000</advertiserid>
  <advertisername>Sample Advertiser Name</advertisername>
  <network id="1">Linkshare Network</network>
  </link>
</couponfeed>

Query Options

You can retrieve coupons by querying on a few different paramaters, Category, Promotion Type, Network, and Merchant ID. Multiple parameters and values per parameter can be requested.

Categories

Coupons are categorized in their vertical, such as Travel & Vacations, Toys & Games, Sports & Fitness, Software & Downloads, Shoes, etc. I presume that these categories are specified by the advertiser per coupon.

Promotion Types.

There is a rich set of promotion types. Here’s the list that I’m getting

• Percentage off
• Other
• Gift with Purchase
• General Promotion
• Friends and Family
• Free Trial / Usage
• Free Shipping
• Dollar Amount off
• Deal of the Day/Week
• Combination Savings
• Clearance
• Buy One / Get One

Included Data

Most of the important data elements appear to be included. In addition to category and promotion types, there’s an offer description, start date, end date, coupon code, restrictions, and all of the necessary image, impression, and click URLs.

All this talk makes me want to launch a new coupon site.