Bidder’s Edge Inc., whose biddersedge.com site shops and searches online auctions, yesterday announced the launch of its affiliate marketing program that’s designed to build brand awareness, drive site traffic and rouse consumer interest in auctions.
The program will allow online retailers, Internet service providers, vertical portals, media companies and community sites to benefit from Bidder’s Edge vast auction searches.
“We’re really trying to get our brand out there and to highlight Bidder’s Edge as the place for auction bidders to go,” said David Pulsifer, director of business development at Bidder’s Edge. “Most of our competitors are focused on the sellers’ services.”
The three-year-old Bidder’s Edge — which next month becomes part of Raleigh, NC-based OpenSite, a marketer of auction content and auction hosting services — tracks 6 million items up for auction at 175 sites, including the FairMarket network. Its chief competitors include AuctionRover.com, AuctionWatch.com and iTrack.com.
Online marketers can register to affiliate by linking to Burlington, MA-based Bidder’s Edge homepage. In its first phase, the affiliate program lets users download an auction search box called the Quik Box. These boxes can be used to conduct a search across all of the auctions monitored by Bidder’s Edge.
In the next round that’s due in a few weeks, the program will allow users to customize the Quik Box for category-specific searches.
Affiliate partners earn a commission for every click-through sent to Bidder’s Edge. The auction shopper will pay 3 cents for each search conducted directly from a member site and another 2 cents for each click-through that winds it way from an approved site referred to Bidder’s Edge by an affiliate partner.
“The benefit to an affiliate is that we offer valuable auction content to their individual sites thereby making them more sticky,” Pulsifer said.
