Second Bite Solutions is an online service provider that has an effective, patent-pending, technology that assists merchants in addressing the shopping cart abandonment problem. But is it at the expense of their traditional affiliates?
According to their website,
Second Bite approaches the problem by addressing the behavioral triggers displayed by consumers during the shopping process. Second Bite sends a series of personalized e-mail messages that gives the shopper the opportunity to review an order left in their shopping cart and reinitiate the check-out process from within the e-mail message. As the merchant, you have complete control over the timing and content of the e-mails, creating a timely and relevant messages – an important aspect in marketing your products to potential customers.
The merchant installs Second Bite’s technology into their shopping cart process where they capture the user information at the earliest possible point in order to keep a lifeline on the visitor in the case of shopping cart abandonment. Second Bite later sends one or more emails to the end user inviting and enticing them back to make the purchase.
As a side note, it seems that Second Bite is taking some aggressive measures to identify the user. From reading their documentation and interviews they have given, it seems that they use AJAX to grab an email address that the user has typed into the form without even hitting the submit button. Thanks to AJAX, it’s not safe to type idly into web forms without the potential that your data is being transmitted anywhere the website owner wishes to, in this case, to Second Bite. Further, as the user’s browser is fetching the Javascript from Second Bite’s servers, they have an opportunity to read a cookie or IP address and attempt to identify the visitor using information they gathered from a different merchant. As a shopper, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this.
In any case, this seems to be a very effective approach to saving a sale. SecondBite claims on their website that shopping cart abandonment can be as high as 75%, and that with their technology, they can increase sales by 3-6%. Or are they merely assisting in 3-6% of sales, some of which would have happened anyway? Still a worthwhile effort and expense for the merchant.
Also compelling to the merchant, they work on a performance basis. The merchant pays only when a sale is made. From their website,
Second Bite works as an affiliate of the merchant. We only get paid for recovering lost sales through our Order recovery application. There are no term commitments. So, we are highly motivated to help you succeed at recovering lost sales from abandoned orders.
Second Bite uses a merchant’s existing affiliate channel. It isn’t the first business model to piggy-back on affiliate marketing for a cheap and easy infrastructure and merchant integration.
This introduces a serious problem. It is potentially stepping on other affiliate marketers. If a merchant has any return-day policy at all (the number of days for which the visitor may make a purchase and the affiliate will still get commission), and most do, the introduction of this service effectively turns it to zero days, at least for users who enter the checkout process and abandon. The merchant is enabling and allowing one affiliate (Second Bite) to take the commission away from the other affiliate.
So while this is an effective way to save sales, it’s also an effective way to shift commissions from one affiliate to another.
Personally, I think that if this service offers the returns that Second Bite promises, without violating the privacy of their visitors (see insert), which is a whole separate issue, it is a pretty compelling service. But, like some other business models, it just doesn’t belong mixed into the traditional affiliate channel.
Merchants who use this service need to recognize the negative impact this will have on other affiliates, and at the very least, notify affiliates that it is in place. It is a similar policy as reducing return-days, and will affect an affiliate’s effective Earnings Per Click (EPC), and will cause some affiliates to look elsewhere for better offers.
Even better, if merchants could find a way to benefit from this service, or one like it, while STILL paying the traditional affiliate marketers their due, everybody wins.
ABestWeb – Second Bite, Super Affiliate or predator
