When building a white-label rewards program that has extensive reach and provides value almost anywhere a shopper might land, it’s critical to have a robust, high-quality portfolio of merchants in place.
At Wildfire, this doesn’t just happen magically - we have an entire Merchant Development team managing merchant relationships.
For each of our clients, we follow a very intentional merchant screening and approval process with a critical eye so that we can safely, soundly, and efficiently publish a wide range of affiliate merchant offers to the customers in each of our clients’ cashback rewards programs.
Here’s a peek behind the curtain of our merchant approval process, ensuring we always have the highest-quality merchants available to clients through our white-label cashback platform.
There’s a host of reasons why it is key to make sure we carefully review and approve the available merchants in our cashback rewards program:
Taking the above themes into consideration, these are the steps we take to ensure merchant quality.
First, it’s important to note that all the merchants providing offers for our cashback rewards programs are initially vetted and approved at the affiliate network level.
The affiliate networks, such as CJ, Impact, ShareASale, and others already have a strict review & approval process which helps to create a strong initial screen for good-quality merchants.
The affiliate networks’ approval process includes:
After the first pass / approval by the affiliate networks, we take an additional look. Certain Wildfire clients’ merchant requirements are stricter than others, so we take an individual approach for the cashback offers that will be available in each clients’ program.
For each client for whom we build a white-label cashback program, we follow these additional steps:
Because Wildfire's cashback platform was purpose-built as a white-label solution, our merchant team can very easily manage individual merchants, or even entire merchant categories, on behalf of our clients. In effect, all of our clients can have their own distinct, custom set of merchants enabled by the ease of our ability to "turn merchants off or on" for each one.
But the work to add high-quality merchants to our clients’ e-commerce rewards programs doesn’t stop there.
After the client’s cashback program has gone live, we continue to perform optimization and to manage the merchants in our portfolio to ensure maximum productivity and results for the client’s cashback rewards program.
Ongoing program management includes the following processes.
Note: this process doesn’t just apply to newly-launched clients - our merchant development team is conducting this work day-in and day-out, for all of our white-label cashback platform clients!
Obviously, we take great pride in the quality of our merchant portfolio. Doing so ensures that we provide a great experience not just for our client brands, but for their customers, so that they have a wide breadth of highly reputable, great quality e-commerce sites to shop and earn cashback rewards from.
Ultimately, a high-quality merchant network is the basis for Wildfire's high-functioning and productive cashback rewards program for a range of clients across numerous verticals.