The News on Shoes

One of the goals of my blog is to share with readers my “hands-on” experience in affiliate marketing. To this end, I thought it may be worthwhile to share with readers my most recent experience marketing shoes online.

I decided to dedicate a few weeks in October to building and marketing an online shoe store. On my site I promote Commission Junction merchants Zappos.com, Shoes.com, and ShoeBuy.com. The site features a comprehensive product catalog that displays shoes from the merchant’s datafeeds.

Building the Site:

Building a data-driven site is always a challenge. Especially when you are working with data from several different merchants. The datafeeds that the merchants provide often contain errors, have outdated inventory, and other inconsistencies. These problems are further complicated when you are working with 100,000+ unique sku’s.

Before you can start displaying products from a datafeed on your site, you must spend considerable time up front ‘massaging’ the data. After spending a few days getting familiar with the merchant product feeds, I was finally able to start building my shoe shopping site.

One of the biggest challenges when creating a shoe site is determining how to categorize the shoes. There are men’s shoes, women’s shoes, kids shoes, and so on. Within each of those categories there are dress shoes, athletic shoes, casual shoes, and more. There are hundreds of brands, and thousands of different styles in each category. I spent almost an entire weekend working out the categories, and making sure the right shoes were displayed in the right categories.

Once I finished setting up the categories, and building out the respective pages, I started working on my landing pages for my paid search campaigns. This was by far the easiest part of the project.

Marketing the Site:

There are pros and cons to marketing a large data-driven site. On one hand you have a lot of potential keywords to work with (100,000+ product names), on the other hand many of those keywords are not profitable. Finding the keywords that actually result in sales takes a lot of time, money, and patience.

So the next step was to submit my keywords to Google and Yahoo
Search Marketingand wait for some sales to start trickling in.

Analyzing the Results:

Once my ads were up and running, I started analyzing my daily cost reports from Google, and Yahoo, along with my daily revenue reports from Commission Junction. After studying my cost, and revenue reports for a few weeks I began noticing some trends:

* Only a small percentage of the keywords on my list were converting sales consistently.
* Most of the keywords on my list were either ‘breaking even’ or losing money.

Once I determined which shoes were hot, and which ones were not, I was able to start making intelligent bidding decisions, and improving my profit margins.

The Shoe Caveat (Returns):

One of the most important things to realize about shoe merchants is that they average a 25-35% return rate across the board. So you have to factor that in to your profit margin. I found this to be true not only from my own site, but also from discussions with other webmasters, and the affiliate manager at .

Summary on Shoes (Opinion):

Despite the fact that the shoe space is very crowded, I feel there is still potential in this market for hard-working affiliates. As I stated earlier, making money on a large data-driven site takes a lot of time, money and patience. It took me nearly 3 weeks, and a few thousand dollars to break even on my paid search campaigns. My profit margin is still modest, but continues to improve as I make small changes to my campaigns and pages.