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  • Jesse Lakes

    Jesse is a Native Montanan and the co-founder and CEO of Geniuslink - or, as he likes to say, head cheerleader. Before Jesse co-founded Geniuslink, he was a whitewater rafting guide, worked at a sushi restaurant, a skate/snowboard shop, was a professional student, and then became the first Global Manager at Apple for the iTunes Affiliate Program.

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Gamestop Affiliate Program Overview

  • Jesse Lakes

    Jesse is a Native Montanan and the co-founder and CEO of Geniuslink - or, as he likes to say, head cheerleader. Before Jesse co-founded Geniuslink, he was a whitewater rafting guide, worked at a sushi restaurant, a skate/snowboard shop, was a professional student, and then became the first Global Manager at Apple for the iTunes Affiliate Program.

  • April 17, 2024
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We’re stoked to introduce Geniuslink auto-affiliation support for the GameStop affiliate program!

For nearly 40 years, GameStop has been one of the most popular retailers for consumer electronics and gaming merchandise, and their presence online continues to grow in 2021!

With the GameStop + Geniuslink integration, you can now build links and earn commissions through the GameStop affiliate program easier than ever!

Overview

Initially founded in Dallas in 1984 as Babbage’s, (in honor of the famous polymath and philosopher Charles Babbage) the small company began focusing on video game sales for the then-dominant Atari 2600.

Following the Video Game Crash of ‘83 they wisely expanded their catalog to include many new titles and peripherals from major brands such Nintendo, Sega, and Midway, capitalizing on the now rebounding home console market. Babbage’s went public in 1988, and by 1991 video games accounted for over two-thirds of Babbage’s total sales.

Unfortunately, the ‘90s was still a bit of a rough period for Babbage’s, and over the course of the decade a series of failed mergers and acquisitions resulted in their parent company of the time (NeoStar) filing for bankruptcy, forcing them to begin looking for buyers for the newly orphaned retail chain.

Thankfully, Barnes & Noble came to the rescue at the turn of the millennium, purchasing Babbage’s Etc. in October 1999 for roughly $215 million, and reintroducing the company to the market in 2002 as GameStop.

GameStop quickly became a staple for gamers throughout the early 2000s, massively expanding their online and retail presence and acquiring competitors like EB Games in 2005. It wasn’t until the mid-late 2010’s that GameStop’s retail business began to decline, primarily due to the shift of video game sales to online storefronts. More recently, the global pandemic has also put significant pressure on GameStop’s retail presence, forcing the company to refocus on what its key business offerings are.

The good news is that GameStop has seen some promising signs lately – Q3 2020 brought an 800% spike in digital sales, bringing online channels to about 20% of GameStop’s total revenue. The company also recently announced a deal with Microsoft Corp. through which it will get a cut each time customers use an Xbox purchased at a GameStop store to buy digital-only products.

Given the recent short-squeeze fiasco GameStop stock saw, there’s clearly still interest in the company – whether it was ironically motivated or not, many consumers still want to see GameStop succeed.

While the future for GameStop is still very much unknown, we’re confident that their online presence will continue to grow over the next couple of years, and we’re excited to be able to offer affiliation support for this storefront so users like you can benefit from it as well.

For some additional background, GameStop.com is ranked as the 1,460th most popular site in the United States and #7 globally for the Video Games Consoles And Accessories category according to SimilarWeb. 

GameStop Affiliate Program

With “the world’s largest collection” of games and gaming peripherals, the GameStop Affiliate Program, is a great alternative for those looking to diversify their affiliate portfolio away from using only the Amazon Associates program.

The GameStop Affiliate program is a well-established affiliate program run through Rakuten, and offers many other benefits to their affiliates besides just commissions.

Commission Rates and Cookie Windows

GameStop offers a pretty competitive commission rate to Amazon for new and used games – offering 1% commission for Digital Games and Subscriptions, and up to 5% commission for pre-owned games and collectibles. Amazon only offers a flat 1% for “Video Games” in comparison, which means there may be more incentive to recommend GameStop if you’re reviewing older games.

GameStop offers the same cookie window as Amazon, meaning you have 24 hours after your link has been clicked for a sale to earn commissions.

Unfortunately we were not able to find any information at the time of this writing about the earnings per click or average conversion rate for the GameStop affiliate program, but we will update this blog if we are able to find details.

Terms and Conditions

GameStop has a fairly simplistic Affiliate Terms of Agreement with much more limited requirements when compared to other similar affiliate programs. That being said you will still need to read through and confirm that you agree to their terms prior to signing up for the program. Upon our investigation two things stood out as important pieces to note:

Pending Commissions

The GameStop Affiliate program pays out commissions in USD within 24 hours following the shipment of the order that was placed. Additionally, if the product is returned within 24 days, the referral fee will be canceled or returned. 

Including Pricing Information

Because of variations in pricing and availability of products, GameStop specifies that you may NOT include pricing information in your product descriptions or anywhere on your site for the product you are promoting. 

GameStop + Geniuslink

While the Rakuten affiliate network dashboard is one of the more streamlined platforms available for assembling affiliate links, depending on your workflow, it is still a bit of a process to create an affiliated product link for GameStop. 

With our newly added support, any raw product link direct from GameStop.com can be affiliated easily using our Geniuslink dashboard or Chrome Extension. You can rest easy, knowing that a simple link from GameStop is all you need to pass clicks along to their destination with your affiliate parameters included.

We call this process “Auto-affiliation,” and it’s very quick to set up. All you need to do is grab your Partner ID from the Rakuten dashboard and drop it into the Affiliate page of the Geniuslink dashboard under ‘GameStop Int. (Rakuten)’. Once we have that seven-digit number, any geni.us links you build for GameStop.com products will have your affiliate parameters appended automatically!

Alternatively, our rollout of Sovrn Commerce (formerly Viglink) support a year ago makes it possible to monetize GameStop links without applying to the Rakuten managed program directly.

There are many reasons for using Sovrn, but signing up for the GameStop affiliate program directly and adding your Media Partner ID into Geniuslink is our recommendation as it allows you to keep 100% of the commissions earned from the program (vs. the ~ 75% that is paid out when using an affiliate aggregator like Sovrn).

Are you excited to dig in and get started using Geniuslink with the GameStop affiliate program? Great! We have a few suggestions to help you diversify your affiliate revenues through augmenting your Amazon affiliate links.

Choice Pages 

We’ve been doubling down on Choice Pages and maintaining our stance that curation and choice are good for the consumer (and ultimately, you). If you’re not familiar, they enable you to promote a single product across multiple storefronts, and thanks to our new Suggestions feature, it’s easier than ever to build them!

Providing options to your visitors will improve their shopping experience, and you’ll monetize the sale no matter which storefront they end up picking. More info on how to set up a Choice Page can be found in our Knowledge Base.

You can see an example here — https://geni.us/ps4choice.

With a Choice Page, you can promote Amazon and GameStop affiliate links side by side in a clean, intuitive way and allows you to diversify your affiliate revenue – which from our research actually helps increase your affiliate earnings! 

Additionally, to help make creating a choice page even more simple, our new Suggestions feature allows you to easily find products across multiple storefronts, including GameStop!

A/B Split Links

The Amazon.com Associates program is often a mainstay way to earn commissions from US-based clicks. However we’d encourage you to run an experiment if it’s the best option for your audience and recommended products. The A/B Split Test links provide a platform to track between two or more affiliate programs closely.

Using an A/B Split Test link allows you to compare the performance of Amazon’s affiliate program to the GameStop affiliate program in case you wanted to evaluate replacing your Amazon affiliate links with another affiliate program.

Author

  • Jesse Lakes

    Jesse is a Native Montanan and the co-founder and CEO of Geniuslink - or, as he likes to say, head cheerleader. Before Jesse co-founded Geniuslink, he was a whitewater rafting guide, worked at a sushi restaurant, a skate/snowboard shop, was a professional student, and then became the first Global Manager at Apple for the iTunes Affiliate Program.

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Author

  • Jesse Lakes

    Jesse is a Native Montanan and the co-founder and CEO of Geniuslink - or, as he likes to say, head cheerleader. Before Jesse co-founded Geniuslink, he was a whitewater rafting guide, worked at a sushi restaurant, a skate/snowboard shop, was a professional student, and then became the first Global Manager at Apple for the iTunes Affiliate Program.

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