First thoughts on the ZiXXo API for local coupons
What is Zixxo?
“ZiXXo™ provides a web-based coupon creation, management and syndication network that enables businesses to reward favorable behavior by local consumers. In plain English, that means that businesses can create and manage their coupons with us and we syndicate them out to local consumers through partner websites.”
The Affiliate Program and the API
I have been in touch with Mike Hogan and have took a moment to briefly go through Zixxo’s recently released API, which is integrated in their Affiliate Program. Here are my initial thoughts, with more to come later…
.NET, nice! Both SOAP and REST support, also nice. They give plenty of code examples to get you started programming in .NET. Looks like it shouldn’t be too much trouble to implement for an MS Developer. Unfortunately, no revenue share will come for at least six months.
As of now, the entire service is free, but in the future they will charge advertisers and share revenue with affiliates. A couple conerns I had with the coupon results returned from the API were:
- Phone numbers with a reference code, eg. call 1800-xxx-xxxx and use reference code ZIXXO. Hmm, as an affiliate how do I get credit?
- There are a lot of “Printable Coupons” for online stores. How does this get tracked from an affiliate perspective?
Who should get the lions share of revenue?
This is relates directly to ZiXXo’s Affiliate Compensation Plan. It is obvious here that referring an advertiser (called an Ad Rep) is more important at the forefront. However, without the Coupon Distributor you aren’t reaching nearly as large a consumer audience. The affiliate traffic and exposure gained through affiliate marketing is substantial. Especially for mashup developers utilizing their API.
Initially their revenue share was 40% and 10%, but it seems they have revised it to be a 40/15 split between the Ad Rep and the Coupon Distributor. I’m inclined to suggest higher revenue for the Coupon Distributor or at least some type of tiering, but am not certain how it could work. One thought is of a sub-tier as well depending on how much traffic is being sent to an advertiser. Eg. If I’m running a pizza coupon website and I’m sending 50 prints a day to Bob’s hardware, and only 1 a day to Joe’s Hardware, it might make sense that I receive more revenue with Bob’s pizza… Hmmm?
With out a doubt the Ad Rep will win out on receiving the bulk of the revenue split as it is much harder to acquire new merchants for Zixxo than it is to give consumers the coupon to use. I would say try to be both an Ad Rep and a Coupon Distributor if you can work it into your site!
Finally, the Zixxo system itself has a large potential to change the current process of local coupon creation and redemption for the better.
Technorati Tags: Zixxo, coupons, local coupons, syndication, developer, .NET, C#, mashup
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