How does offers.com make money?

[sbs]

I am just wondering, www. offers.com have thousands of online website's products listed on them...which I doubt is not a manuall aggregation...they must be scraping these online websites by visiting their promotion/sales pages or subscribe to their deals page...but how do they make money is thats the case...

Only scenario is they might be running affiliate programs but how is it possible aggregate hundreds of sites affiliate links and too have their latest deals on them...

please clear my doubt.

 

[N-A]

I doubt a site of that magnitude is scraping, since there appears to be much more involved in it at this point.

However, they are probably searching affiliate networks for offer links (easy) as well as all affiliates that allow deep linking and manually going into each company so see what the best offer is.

 

[enlytend]

How is it possible aggregate hundreds of sites affiliate links and too have their latest deals on them...

Very easy - I do it myself (on a much smaller scale ). Product feeds ("data feeds"). If you're an affiliate, you can get the latest one(s) from merchants which offer them (generally for free) - set up a script to monitor and import new data. Cleaning up data and maintaining consistency between merchants (especially things like feed format and category structure) can be a major issue.. Feed formats are at least consistent for merchants participating the same affiliate network (CJ, Linkshare, etc.), but differ from network to network. Offers are usually available in a separate feed and not always available through the network.

There are services you can subscribe to which process and aggregate feeds - you can get access to their data for a fee. There are also some easy datafeed display solutions you can use and just drop into your site. But for a serious large-scale operation, customization, whether entirely DIY or using an API from a feed aggregator service, is the way to go.

Another example of a multiple merchant business model is Rakuten Shopping (formerly Buy.com) - merchants join the program and pay a monthly fee to have a merchant page and their items listed on Rakuten's site. Rakuten also collects a commission and a per-item fee on transactions. Rakuten in turn has an affiliate program promoting THEM, so they split some of the commission they get through affiliate-generated sales with their affiliates.

 

[sbs]

@enlytend great Reply.

They are doing really good because they have hundreds of store, may be thousands. They have every other store on earth.