• 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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Best Buy Affiliate Program + Geniuslink [Updated]

  • 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.

Contents

Update: As of July 2019, Best Buy’s affiliate program is now being managed by Impact! 

Please note that the Best Buy affiliate program managed by Rakuten Marketing is being deprecated. If you’re only signed up for Best Buy through Rakuten, you will want to apply to Impact’s Best Buy affiliate program as soon as possible to ensure that no clicks go unaffiliated!

Best Buy marks the sixth affiliate program we’ve added support for, and we are excited about the opportunities this unlocks. Creators, Influencers, and Streamers that regularly recommend consumer electronics, PC components, TVs, stereos, and gaming consoles to their audience can now get even more powerful geni.us links. Full support for auto-affiliation of Bestbuy.com’s affiliate program, via Impact, can now be found within the Geniuslink dashboard!

Overview

Best Buy is a household name in the United States and was the destination box store in my formative years.  And, it looks like I’m not alone, according to Yahoo! Finance, Best Buy is the largest specialty retailer in the United States consumer electronics retail industry. Further, Best Buy is ranked No. 72 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations based on total revenue.

Looking online, BestBuy.com is now ranked as the 324th most popular websites in the world, 85th in the US, and 4th for “Computers Electronics and Technology” according to SimilarWeb.

Affiliate Program

Being a top retailer for Consumer Electronics makes Best Buys’ affiliate program a contender for affiliate marketers looking for alternative destinations than Amazon. 

Previously managed by Rakuten Linkshare, as of July 2019 BestBuy’s affiliate program is handled by Impact.  The Best Buy affiliate program offers a 24-hour cookie window and a 1% commission on most products. Additionally, a 5% bounty is available on wireless plans.  

For consumer electronics in general, the published Best Buy commission rate on Impact’s dashboard is 1%, which is significantly less than the 4% Amazon.com pays out for the same category.  Additionally, Amazon pays out 2.5% for PC components and 2% for Televisions. However, Best Buy’s commission rate of 1% matches Amazon.com for video games and consoles.  

Additionally, the 1 day /24-hour cookie window for BestBuy.com is identical to Amazon.com Associate’s program cookie window.  

According to Skimlinks, the average earnings per click (EPC) for Best Buy is $0.011 and the average commission rate is 1.14%.  Skimlinks also reports the average conversion rate at 0.47% and the average basket size at $203.53. VigLink reports the EPC slightly higher at $0.015 but the average commission rate lower at 0.68%.  Traditionally we see Amazon.com’s EPC at about $0.05.

Best Buy also currently offers retail stores in both Canada and Mexico and subsequently has localized storefronts at bestbuy.ca and bestbuy.com.mx respectively.  Unfortunately, information about region-specific affiliate programs for Canada and Mexico was not readily available. The BestBuy.com affiliate program limits international reach to the US, Gaum and Virgin Islands. 

The Best Buy affiliate program’s terms and conditions are fairly straightforward, though they appear to limit you from posting affiliate links on “social communities” without prior written permission.   

Best Buy + Geniuslink

While the Impact dashboard offers a linking generation tool, it’s still a bit of a process to take a product link from the BestBuy.com site and convert it into a fully functioning affiliate link.  

With the addition of our support of the Best Buy affiliate program, any BestBuy.com product link can now be shortened as a geni.us link and you can rest assured that all clicks through it will be sent to the correct destination as a properly formatted affiliate tracking link.

We call this process “Auto affiliation” and it’s very simple to set up. Just grab your 7-digit “Partner ID” from the top left of your Impact dashboard and drop it into Geniuslink on the Affiliate page. Once we have your Partner ID value added into your Geniuslink account all of your geni.us links for BestBuy.com will start using the tracking info appropriate for your affiliate account. 

Please note our rollout of VigLink and Skimlinks support also enables you to monetize BestBuy.com links through either of these monetization platforms. There are multiple benefits of using VigLink or Skimlinks, but signing up directly through Impact and adding your Partner ID  into Geniuslink allows you to keep 100% of your commissions earned from the program (vs. the ~ 75% that is paid out when using an affiliate aggregator).

Excited to try out using Geniuslink with the BestBuy.com affiliate program? We have a few suggestions if you are up for a challenge and want to experiment with augmenting your Amazon affiliate links.

A/B Split Links – The Amazon.com Associates program is often a mainstay way to earn commissions from US-based clicks, though we’d encourage you to test if its the best option for your audience and recommended products. The A/B Split Test links provide a platform to closely track between two or more affiliate programs.  Try this link for example — geni.us/ST-Dysonv11

Choice Pages – We believe that providing consumers with options of where they buy is good for them and helps you diversify your revenue.  With this thesis, we have built out Choice Pages to enable you to promote a single product but offer multiple destinations for the consumer to choose from (and you’ll monetize the sale either way).  You can see an example here — geni.us/CP-Dysonv11 — and we bet you’ll see a boost in overall conversions and total commissions. More info on how to set up a Choice Page can be found in our Knowledge Base.

Conclusion

In the coming weeks, we’ll continue rolling out support for monetizing your links across a number of different affiliate networks in addition to the auto-affiliation support we rolled out earlier this year for Walmart.com, B&H Photo Video, and thousands of other affiliate programs via integrations with VigLink and Skimlinks. We are just getting started!

A list of the affiliate programs we currently support can be found on our website and you can vote for which programs we add next in our private Facebook group for Geniuslink users

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.

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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