Affiliate Window has just officially launched online advertisingÂ’s answer to Facebook

Affiliate Window has just officially launched online advertising’s answer to Facebook

The affiliate marketing network, which is a division of Digital Window, is replacing the interface it has offered merchants and affiliates, AWin, with its new Darwin tool, which employs the latest social networking functionality for managing these relationships.

Affiliate marketing – using one website to drive traffic to another – plays a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies, despite the fact that search engines, email, and website syndication may have a higher profile within some retailers.

Darwin aims to make affiliate and merchant profiles available through directories that arrange and index each group by promotional or product type and AWin rankings. Both groups can send invites to connect or partner that gets sent to the recipient’s activity stream.

Search results in the Darwin affiliate directory, for example, are separated into the different tabs based on the promotional types that affiliates have categorised themselves into, and can be filtered by membership status.

Networking affiliate connections

Peter Loveday, Affiliate Window chief technology officer, told Retail Technology magazine that idea behind Darwin was to reinvent the company’s network 10 years on from AWin with a more social core.

“We see Darwin becoming a social marketplace, that gives affiliates and merchants the facility to interact and work with each and make money,” he said. “We’re still there to provide the technology to facilitate the interactions and transactions, but Darwin helps users build a profile of their business that can, in turn, help them match their interests with other network members.

“It’s also a way of levelling the playing field for participants and adding transparency to the process.”

While there are plans to further develop Darwin, it appears to have been welcomed by its users, as one respondent to a recent David Fisk blog post write: “I think Darwin could even be the basis for fostering more interactive and relevant communications between affiliates and merchants.”