1) I don’t see why “affiliates who don’t use VCs” have one good reason for not using them. A coupon frequently helps close the deal, and regardless of the primary marketing method used by an affiliate, they can only enhance their conversions by adding a merchant’s coupon here and there.

2) As for your second point, I think that with a proper coupon policy a merchant can greatly benefit from coupons (or voucher codes), and doesn’t have to sacrifice their profit margins at ll. After all, coupons can be product- or category-specific, or one can offer free shipping over a certain order amount, or some other deal that is enticing, and moves the consumer towards that order.

Speaking from an agency affiliate manager, there’s really two issues here:

1. Affiliates who don’t use VCs vs. voucher code sites – strong case for value-based commission attribution here.

2. (the more significant one) The perception that VCs are a sin, I completely agree that VC can and should be used tactically, and indeed this is what we encourage our clients to do, however, one has to consider how a brand might perceive this, at the end of the day, with every VC released consumers are that much more likely to search for ‘brand+vocher code’; it also kills a brands margins and lastly, over here in the UK, VC sites dominate the affiliate market, they amount to the top 10 affiliates on most campaigns, on this basis, it’ll soon become voucher code marketing rather than affiliate marketing…

sure you can say the economy and consumers demand codes, but how do you justify this to merchants who already have the perception that codes are non-kosher?

I did actually wrote an article about Discount Coupons in affiliate marketing

Here is a preview:

“I would say we should discuss 2 situations:

* The visitor is strongly considering buying the product from the producer site. He then searches for discounts and buys from an affiliate. Is this a clear case of paying an affiliate for a sale you would anyway do? Well, first of all, even if the visitor on your site is considering to buy, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t have 2-3 other competitor sites opened and he compares products and prices. And if he searches and finds one of your coupons, then this just might be your chance to make the sale against the other 2-3 sites.

* Second, how many times you had doubts over paying for a product, especially now in these tough times? How many times you thought: yeah, I would love to have this product, but I’d better wait? So if your site visitor is looking for a coupon and gets it from an affiliate, maybe this is all he needs to make up his mind.”

Content affiliates can thwart loosing the credit to a coupon affiliate by placing a coupon adjacent to a product link and product description. A focus on the desired product with a coupon will clinch the deal just as the cherry on top of an ice cream sundae completes the total dessert.