Rakuten buys Popshops Feed Aggregator

[enlytend]

Rakuten, the company best known in this forum for purchasing "Buy.com" and renaming it "Rakuten Shopping", just bought Popshops - an affiliate datafeed aggregator.

Happy for them on the sale, but probably the beginning of the end for the product... Rakuten also owns the affiliate network formerly known as Linkshare - which still sucks as much as ever.

 

[scorzaze]

What do you mean by, "the beginning of the end for the product"? I have a couple of websites using popshop datafeeds. Yes, your right about Linkshare... They suck big time!

 

[JB Lions]

Don't think it's the end of the product, this is what one of their reps said:

"Rest assured, there will be no change on PopShops’ services and products to our customers and we will continue and strive to be the #1 product and coupon platform. Also, we are and will remain a multi-network feed aggregator. PopShops subscribers will continue to have access to merchants integrated in Rakuten PopShops across all participating networks. The acquisition helps PopShops with more resources to bring even more geographies and products to market for our customers."

More info - http://www.popshops.com/rakutenmarketing

Just like Rakuten bought Linkshare, and they pretty much let it be an affiliate network, just rebranded it. I think the same will happen here. There is no reason to kill the product.

Ebay bought Pepperjam awhile back and people were wondering what would happen there. Nothing really, still an affiliate network, and just recently they rebranded that to eBay Enterprise Affiliate Network.

 

[enlytend]

I don't think they're going to kill it, I just don't know how much they'll go forward with it... I've been an enterprise level user for years - its overall a good service, but lots of annoyances and things we've asked for that they said they'd be open to implementing which never happened.

Same with Linkshare - plenty of room for improvement - big company buys it, presumably they would have the money to take a look at the platform and try to make improvements... maybe I missed something because I don't use them for much, but I haven't seen any signs of that yet. For starters, many merchants with long-time tracking issues run their programs on Linkshare. (I won't name names here, but doesn't take much research to find who they are.)

 

[JB Lions]

I use it a lot, just noticed one of my sites getting some nice Pinterest traffic, looks like people have pinned items/products from about 10% of my pages that use PopShops.

"I just don't know how much they'll go forward with it.."

I know they're swimming in money, so we'll see. But I did notice them pushing it on their blog today:

"Use basic BentoBox and Rakuten PopShops tools to quickly create and add basic affiliate links to your site to begin earning"

http://blog.linkshare.com/2013/08/p...ger-publisher-in-the-network/?fb_source=pubv1

So that's good to see. I'm just waiting to see if they up the price on me. I was one of the first to sign up and use it and got grandfathered prices. But if they do, still worth it to me.