Wildfire Case Study

OctoShop ignites a profitable, scalable cashback revenue stream with Wildfire

OctoShop is a tech startup specializing in price tracking and comparison technology via a browser extension. OctoShop’s offering was beloved by customers but hardly profitable as a business model by itself. For OctoShop to continue to grow, they needed new revenue streams that integrated with their pre-existing technology.

OctoShop found a cashback program to be a natural fit for their business model. However, they encountered issues implementing an affiliate marketing program that would deliver them commission revenue that moved the needle.

As they tried to become affiliates for e-commerce stores, they were challenged by the manual nature of the process. They had trouble landing one-off affiliate contracts with major e-commerce stores. They also explored using cashback programs so they could easily provide incentives for their customers to shop but experienced significant communication difficulties with third-party cashback providers.

Partnering with Wildfire solved all of these issues simply. With intuitive API and SDK integrations, OctoShop quickly began generating revenue from their cashback program from tens of thousands of stores online.

OctoShop’s Cashback Ambitions — Challenges and Objectives

OctoShop initially planned to generate incremental revenue from their users' browsing behavior by creating their own deep pool of affiliate contracts to show to customers. However, they quickly learned it wouldn’t be so easy for the ambitious startup.

Difficulty Securing Affiliate Approval

“We only had contracts with something like 50 stores. We didn’t know if this idea was going to work from a revenue standpoint,” says Darshan Chatta, OctoShop CTO. OctoShop was frequently rejected, a story all-too-familiar to many tech startups, due to a lack of affiliate history.

Because of their small pool of merchants, their cashback program was ineffective and didn’t move the needle in any tangible way. And because of the difficulty securing new contracts, there wasn’t a straightforward solution to developing a profitable and scalable program.

We thought that getting stores was going to be pretty easy, but we ended up getting rejected a lot.”
—Darshan Chatta, CTO of OctoShop.

Communication Headaches With Partners

When you’re a small startup trying to make a name for yourself, your position on the totem pole can dictate the amount of attention you receive from your partners. For OctoShop, the headaches they experienced while working with partners intended to help grow their cashback program were more trouble than the program itself was worth.

“From dashboards to attribution to APIs, everything was made more difficult than it needed to be because of a lack of communication and timely support from our partners.” For OctoShop, it felt like there was no easy way to grow its affiliate reach.

Wildfire Supplies the Lightbulb Moment

Stemming from a recommendation that changed the course of OctoShop’s trajectory, Wildfire’s flexible cashback solution helped elevate OctoShop’s revenue potential practically overnight. Octoshop Desktop Mockup with alert on Macy's

Instant Affiliate Reach

OctoShop and its customers instantly gained access to cashback offers from tens of thousands of online merchants. The trust issue from affiliates that stemmed from the company’s lack of history immediately disappeared because Wildfire already had established trustworthy relationships with a massive stable of retail partners.

OctoShop no longer had to build individual relationships with each merchant or affiliate network because Wildfire takes care of all affiliate management from specific deals to contract negotiation, network compliance, and more. “Finding Wildfire was a lightbulb moment. It was a perfect solution for us,” lauded Chatta.

Superior Customer Support

After the trauma OctoShop experienced with support and slow response times from previous affiliate companies, they were hesitant to put so much trust into another cashback partner.

Those apprehensions were quickly calmed. “Every problem we had from a technical standpoint, they were very responsive. Not only that, they were quick to develop solutions to meet our needs, no matter how unique,” said Chatta.

OctoShop and Wildfire used a shared Slack channel to make communications fast, reliable, and accessible. Any time OctoShop had a question, they were offered immediate access to the Wildfire team. Chatta went on to say, “Wildfire’s commitment to customer support made what could have been a difficult implementation straightforward.”

Simple, Easy-to-Integrate API

Wildfire’s ability to connect existing technology, like OctoShop’s browser extension, with affiliate reach, is a major selling point to a company like OctoShop. “Integrating with their API was super easy. You don’t have to worry about creating pipelines and connections to individual affiliate networks and retailers. Wildfire is a great aggregation of them all. It’s a fantastic solution,” explained Chatta.

Cashback Profitability Comes

While inventory tracking and price comparison tools are invaluable for customers, OctoShop knew they needed more avenues for incremental revenue to continue growing. But after experiencing such trouble developing an impactful program and finding reliable partners, hope was thin.

That’s why Wildfire is often described as a “lightbulb moment” by partners like Darshan Chatta and OctoShop. Wildfire gave OctoShop the affiliate reach and customer cashback opportunities most startup tech only dream of. Wildfire’s API allowed OctoShop to scale to offer cashback opportunities from over 30,000 merchants instantly. Quite a step up from the 50 merchants they had previously.

If you’re new to the affiliate game, you automatically get all these relationships, and integrating with their API is super easy.”

OctoShop’s Next Steps with Wildfire

OctoShop plans to further leverage Wildfire by integrating a digital coupon program to add an extra layer of competitiveness to their extension. Digital coupon programs have become ubiquitous. Online shoppers now expect and actively look for coupons. “The logical next step is a robust coupon program that supports tracking and reporting with no upfront development costs,” explained Chatta.

Wildfire Case Study —

How OctoShop Found Their “Lightbulb” Cashback Solution