Michelle Lomas
Commission Factory.
Alex Short
Michelle, thank you so much for inviting us in and for Commission Factory for being so supportive because we're always kind of lurking in the background of doing technology rather than being in the forefront.
Michelle Lomas
Mm-hmm. So we'll dive into a little bit more to explain exactly what that means.
Michelle Lomas
Because it took me a little while.
Michelle Lomas
For a company so young, you've recently won a few awards, which is great.
Alex Short
Yeah, it's been wild. I think, the Global Performance Marketing Awards last year, I'm sure there were a few people sort of scratching their heads of like who, who's this startup winning awards?
Michelle Lomas
Huge. Huge.
Michelle Lomas
If you could kind of do a 101 and explain what you do in very simple terms, cuz that's what I kind of needed when we first met.
Michelle Lomas
So people might actually be familiar with you but they don't realize it is you.
Alex Short
That's correct. We're we're that tiny little logo in the bottom of loyalty platforms that says Powered by PerformID. You know, there are a lot of problems that exist with banks and working with affiliate.
Alex Short
Exactly. We wanted to remove all the barriers of friction that exist in there and, and what we kept hearing was that the customers themselves. I heard on some of your recent podcasts talking about the troubles of how do we educate customers in what is cash back, right?
Michelle Lomas
Ooh, credit back. Yeah. Ooh, you've coined a new term there. I like that.
Alex Short
Yeah. You're not getting cash into your account, you're just netting it off your invoice. But the whole purpose there is for you to earn it without even having to think and smoothing out the whole process for you as an end user.
Michelle Lomas
Yeah, it feels very forward thinking, considering consumers are just getting their head around cash back at the moment. But it does require you to always be aware of cash back. I've got to go into the app first, or I've got to click that little button on my browser, which it's not hard, but you can forget a lot.
Michelle Lomas
Easily. I've done it so many times. Whereas this obviously makes it a lot simpler and smoother.
Alex Short
Yeah, for sure.
Michelle Lomas
And a consumer doesn't even have to think about it.
Alex Short
Beyond that as well. The consumer might not understand what, you know, perhaps maybe a cashback or loyalty site does, but when they know it's aligned with their payment provider a customer can easily understand, hey, there's a financial relationship between a merchant and my banking provider, so I can understand that the ability to cut me a reward exists. Right. As opposed to maybe a loyalty platform where you might sign up and you say, Hey, like this seems a bit scammy. I don't really know where these loyalty sites are getting their commissions from.
Michelle Lomas
Yeah, it's really great. It's really just breaking down that friction. Right?
Michelle Lomas
You've obviously won a bit of an award with your work that you've been doing with Amex. Why don't you share a little bit about what you do there and what makes that program so special?
Alex Short
Obviously it hats off to our friends at Amex. They've been incredible, the brand that they operate, you know, Amex is known for being premium.
Michelle Lomas
Mm, it's so true. I think cashback or credit back can often be seen as something that's just like deep performance, and I agree from that perspective.
Alex Short
You know, a lot of brands would probably work with My Amex Shop just because they know, um, that it won't affect their brands.
Michelle Lomas
Mm-hmm. Because you can get access to all those great brands and, and retailers.
Alex Short
A hundred percent.
Michelle Lomas
How can brands work with you guys? Because you're kind of a B2B and a B2C, I think. So what's the best way that people can engage with you guys?
Alex Short
Yeah, that's a good synopsis. I'd say we're B2B to C, which makes it even more complicated. But yeah, the brands themselves, you know, working through Commission Factory, working on their affiliate tracking.
Alex Short
The only other thing obviously is you need to take Amex.
Alex Short
For sure. The award that we won in the GPMA awards, um, that was surrounding a French luxury brand.
Michelle Lomas
There's so many elements to that. It's tapping into culture, building brand, tapping into that desire for buying collectible clothing, as well as obviously tapping to the performance side of it.
Alex Short
Yeah. Uh, it does help obviously being aligned with banks and American Express that their marketing budgets turn into, you know, wild dreams that a startup could never do themselves. So definitely it's nice to play in that a little bit.
Michelle Lomas
Yeah. Great. I heard you did some really great work with My Muscle Chef as well, who we've had on the show. We had Ashley on the show. She's fantastic. Still one of our most listened to episodes actually. So, uh, what did you do there?
Alex Short
Asides from all the test orders that we've been having in the office, I think we're all completely full of My Muscle Chef.
Alex Short
Uh, we're we're big fans, so, um, yeah, we, we do this type of promotion whereby once a month we give an exclusive homepage takeover for a merchant of the month or store of the month we call it. And my muscle chef came straight out of the gates and saying, Hey, you know, we're, we're keen to participate.
Michelle Lomas
Huge fan of that team. Huge fan of Ashley. She's an incredibly intelligent woman, but the way that they run their entire business through data and affiliate marketing is like their strongest channel. Obviously they've partnered with you for a reason because, you know, they don't, they don't partner with anyone unless they're seeing the success.
Alex Short
Hats off to them in, in understanding the value of an affiliate partner in this case, because they didn't pay for just new users, they also put a lower commission rate for existing customers.
Michelle Lomas
Fantastic.
Alex Short
And you know, especially when you work with a bank or a closed loop loyalty, uh, customer base, you know that you're borrowing a customer base rather than acquiring.
Michelle Lomas
Yeah. Yeah. Credit to them. Definitely. They're a fantastic company. Um, so I wanna take a little bit of a step back. How'd you get started? What's the story?
Alex Short
Oh, the story's a long one actually. I, um, I'll try and cut it down for the podcast, but, I used to actually teach English over in Korea before I moved here and then after that, you know, it was a GFC at home, I was like, where am I gonna go? I came down to Sydney cuz my brother was here. And I got a job at a service office space and one of the clients in there was an affiliate network. I was like, ah, what, what is it that you guys do? Like I, I'm, I'm really interested.
Michelle Lomas
Great. And you've just grown very quickly over the last few years. What do you think is the future of cash back or credit back?
Alex Short
The future is definitely more instant. I think that there's so much friction that exists with this 60 to 90 day delay for customers. So solving the problem for the customers is reducing that friction and even coming to the point where we no longer need a click, I think how good would it be to just go on and, and link your card and then shop anywhere knowing that you're gonna get these rewards and card linking does that a little bit in itself.
Michelle Lomas
And that is available to brands now if they wanna work with you.
Alex Short
Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. We do it. We do it automatically. Yeah.
Michelle Lomas
Great. Good for them to know that.
Michelle Lomas
Um, and my last question for you is, you know, if anybody listening is interested, then maybe they're in the cashback space or they're looking to get into it. What advice do you have for them?
Alex Short
Persistency, I think, it's a hard space to get into, but you know, the reason we developed into who we are is because we solved a problem.
Michelle Lomas
Yeah. Great.
Alex Short
Yeah. PerformID wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the partners that we have around us. Yeah. And kind of in a way we're all on a boat, um, and everybody has an oar and we think like Amex has a few oars and they're rowing hard and we've got Commission Factory with another oar, and we've got the merchants rowing their oars.
Michelle Lomas
Beautiful.
Michelle Lomas
Thank you, Alex. This has really been very informative and of course if anyone's interested to work with you, they can reach out to the Commission Factory team.
Alex Short
Fantastic. Thank you so much for having me on.
Michelle Lomas
So many interesting insights from Alex regarding the future of cashback to drive brand and build loyalty.
Dave Simmons
And then we discovered a solution through Commission Factory that said, Hey, listen, we'll develop a chatbot for you and be focused purely on helping you drive sales, and we'll be able to charge you a commission based upon sales generated off the chatbot as the last point of contact on the onsite journey.
Michelle Lomas
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