IT House is an international software house based in Latvia. The company focuses primarily on bringing custom solutions for online marketplaces, such as Sharetribe, and has invaluable experience in this area.
Key challenges
- Creating a custom Ambassador (affiliate) Program for a marketplace.
- Overcoming the limitations of an online marketplace.
- Reducing operational costs.
- Shortening time-to-market.
Our customer, Navisyo, required an ambassador program, and we were down to two choices: creating one from scratch or integrating with the proper software. We've chosen the second option.
Navisyo is a company that offers floatel stays, voyages, and on-water events to their customers and has been working with IT House for over two years. So when the Navisyo team decided to make their offer even more appealing by adding discounts and the Ambassador program, they immediately turned to IT House, who agreed that the best, most cost-effective solution would be to find a software that does precisely that. And that's where Voucherify came in.
One of the ways we use Voucherify is by issuing discount coupons. Though discount coupons might seem typical and a pretty simple development task, it only works if we speak about e-commerce stores.
With marketplaces, it's a whole different story since they usually operate on transaction fees, meaning that customer payment is automatically distributed between marketplace operator and provider.
The goal of integrating Voucherify into Navisyo's project in Sharetribe Flex was to make redeeming the coupon for marketplace fee possible. This part was tricky but possible with the set of tools provided by Voucherify.
The biggest challenge in the integration, though, proved to be creating the Ambassador program. Since it isn't a typical affiliate program you might know from SaaS or ecommerce companies, it required a much more detailed approach and a custom solution. As a result, the IT House team designed two scenarios that needed to be considered to achieve all the goals.
In short, the ambassador program has been created on top of two Voucherify products: gift cards and a referral program. How does it work?
The Ambassador program features unique affiliate URLs for all users who signed up to Navisyo. Each time a traveler purchases a Floatel, Voyage, or an Event via that link, the Ambassador earns a 1% commission. Credits earned by the Ambassadors are stored on the gift card, so the gift card, in this case, works as a personal wallet for each Ambassador.
Besides this functionality, the affiliate code also grants a discount for the first purchase made by the referred user.
Integrating with Voucherify turned out to be the most cost- and time-effective solution for IT House. Thanks to the personalized approach, they were able to provide the Ambassador program for Navisyo within a month, instead of developing it from square one, risking a significant time and money loss.
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