Consumer buying behaviour and shopping habits are continually evolving, with the increase in smartphone penetration, more and more consumers are accessing the internet on a mobile device.

Looking at Affiliate Window’s mobile stats back in December 2010, mobile traffic accounted for 2.4% of total network activity. Fast forward to March 2012 and these figures have grown considerably with mobile accounting for 10% of total traffic and 6.6% of sales.

Source: Awin 2012

What is more Affiliate Window forecast that by the end of the year approximately 14.5% of transactions will come from mobile devices.

With this huge growth in mobile traffic it is imperative that advertisers make the consumer buying journey as smooth as possible. I am still amazed by the number of advertisers that do not have a dedicated mobile site. This makes viewing products, adding them to basket and the final check-out stage difficult. This has led to conversion rate through mobile dropping as the amount of mobile traffic has increased.

As well as a poor user journey being to blame for the drop in conversion rate, many advertisers that have a mobile site do not implement affiliate tracking. This means that a high proportion of affiliate sales are missed.

The lack of mobile preparedness from affiliate advertisers is an issue. If advertisers really want to take advantage of the affiliate mobile opportunities available they must develop a dedicated mobile site with robust affiliate tracking in place.

I love to pick up a bargain and often my first touch point after finding a product to purchase online, is a discount site (affiliate site). If you are not familiar with affiliate marketing it is a marketing practise where a business rewards one or more affiliates for their marketing efforts that deliver sales.

Essentially, this means that if an affiliate drives a customer to the merchant’s site and the customer makes a purchase, the affiliate is rewarded (usually as a percentage of the sales revenue).

There are four core players involved in affiliate marketing – the merchant (also known as the retailer), the network (contains affiliate sites, merchants, and deals with payment terms), the publisher (also known as the affiliate) and the customer.

Each affiliate site uses different means to drive sales:

• Cashback sites – rewards customers for a sale by means of cashback e.g. Quidco
• Voucher code sites – provide customers with product/service discounts e.g. MyVoucherCodes
• Comparison shopping – helps the customer find the lowest price e.g. Kelkoo
• Search – utilise PPC e.g.Click Angel
• Email – send out newsletters to a targeted database Freemax Media
• Blogs – often focus on a niche area e.g. boutique fashion

The UK affiliate market is currently a £42 billion a year industry (Econsultancy Internet Statistics Compendium 2011) which looks set to grow even bigger as major affiliate sites increase their marketing spend (has anyone seen Quidco advertising on the tube?).

However, I think the affiliate area is lacking in one particular area and this is providing a personalised experience to users.  It would be great to visit a site such as My Voucher Codes and be targeted with personalised offers based on my previous browsing/shopping experiences.

Currently out of the major cash back and voucher code sites in the UK, only Quidco are offering any sign of personalised content. The site has a small ‘recommended for you tab’ when a user is logged into their account.

One of the main reasons that sites are not offering customers personalised offers is that often the user does not have to be logged in to their account to redeem an offer. This makes personalising the customer experience difficult as the site will have limited customer data available.

There are only so many times I can read my 1 year old daughter “That’s Not My Monkey” or  “Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy”, so last weekend I took myself off to Waterstone’s on Godalming High Street to buy her/me a new book.

It was only when I had a collection of books in my hand and was approaching the till that I panicked.  I reached for my iPhone, fired up the ‘Quidco’ app and realised that I could actually buy the same books from Waterstones.com (via Qudico) and get 8% cash back.

Admittedly this only equated to around £1.50, but all the same it was enough for me to put the books back on the shelf and buy them online.  Upon closer inspection of my Quidco account I realised that I have actually earned over £400 from doing exactly this with a host of other retailers since January.

The last few years has seen a number of high street favourites disappear including Woolworths, Habitat, Jane Norman, Oddbins and Thorntons – with the likes of HMV flirting with financial meltdown for sometime (despite selling Waterstone’s back in May). Only yesterday the Government’s ‘shops tsar’, Mary Portas acknowledged the impact online shopping has had on our high street with figures also released yesterday revealing 25 areas in the UK where at least one in four high street shops is empty.

Whilst out of town shopping centres and shopping malls have long been touted as the key reason behind the demise of our local high streets it is apparent that consumer’s increased propensity to buy online has also caused many mainstream, high street retailers to be shunned in preference to cheaper, online retailers. This shift has gathered pace over the last 18 months with the increased use of cash back sites such as Quidco and TopCashBack meaning that many people are thinking twice before buying full price on the high street.

People buying online is hardly a new phenomenon and whilst I can understand why smaller retailers (such as local butchers and bakers) are getting squeezed out of business by the bigger retailers and out of town shopping centres, I think it’s inexcusable that any big retailer worth its salt is going out of business and blaming its inability to be competitive.

Retailers that haven’t had the foresight to embrace the likes of Quidco, Foursquare or Groupon will be losing business.  However, smart marketers (like those at the Feather & Black, Halford’s, Homebase and Debenhams) have had the vision to not only offer cash back on online purchases, but also pay cash back via Quidco for in store purchases – meaning that I am likely to still visit their stores, pick up the products, buy in store and feel like I am getting a bargain.

As consumers we shouldn’t feel guilty about snubbing high street chains that don’t incentivise us to shop with them – why should we pay more?

I have no doubt that the decline of our high street can be slowed down and possibly even halted by some smarter commercial thinking.  Those retailers that embrace ‘on to offline’ tools such as in store cash back, click and collect and mobile voucher codes will survive – those that don’t, won’t (and really don’t deserve to).