Meet Gabriel Bonciu, Business Development Director at BusinessLeague.com, the #1 affiliate marketing platform in the region. BusinessLeague is designed (and thoroughly validated in the last 5 years) as the only gamified marketplace where e-shops and marketers compete with one another – they promote, relegate, get prizes and bonuses. The main rule? Generate sales.
We caught up with Gabi just enough for Nikola Ilchev (Founder of Balkan eCommerce Summit) to ask him some questions about growth in eCommerce. Here’s what he got.
Gabi, what exactly is BusinessLeague.com?
It’s efficiency at its best. BusinessLeague.com is a marketplace, but it’s also the only eCommerce championship in the world. It is an enabler, but also a referee for the two relevant parties in affiliate marketing (and in eCommerce): shops and marketers.
BusinessLeague.com helps them find the right partnerships so that they both win at the end of the day. This means marketers (and influencers) drive traffic for merchants, while merchants pay them a % commission only based on sales.
Again: merchants pay ONLY FOR SALES, not for clicks or traffic.
Our marketplace operates on a fair system: cost per sale. So it’s quite different from the traditional way of doing marketing & sales, where shops turn to agencies and the agencies give them a nice pitch, some cool promises and everybody hopes for the best.
In BusinessLeague, marketers put up their own resources (time, money, experience) so they must deliver in order to make a profit.
Marketers sound like good business people.
The best. Some are one-man shows, some are actual businesses. And they do have to be good, because otherwise they would get jobs in agencies, haha. But seriously, they are the definition of efficiency and results. They have skin in the game and when you have skin in the game, everything changes. You’re focused on results. Not many people are like that, but the best such marketers are in BusinessLeague.com.
It’s a narrow game for them. They are always watching their campaigns, always making sure they deliver. Both for their sake of course, but also for the shops. They always have to stay profitable and that is great news for e-shops all over the world.
There are more than 3,000 active affiliates doing business on our platform, each with unique sales & marketing techniques and experience.
Do marketers make a lot of money?
The good ones, yes. The great ones double yes. But that means most importantly, that they drive sales, cause otherwise they wouldn’t get paid.
How much on average per sale?
It varies. Conversion rates went up recently. Anywhere between 5 to 8%. During the best times of the year – Black Friday, Christmas, Easter, Summer time – top affiliates earn a lot of money and a lot of experience which they use to further increase their income. The focus for them is always getting better, learning more, staying ahead. Affiliate Marketing really works well when you have a competitive mindset.
Talk about the shops taking advantage of these champions of marketing
In BusinessLeague.com we have shops from many countries across all verticals. Fashion, Books, Beauty, IT&C, Adult, Pharma, Toys and so on. As long as they’re selling objects, not services, all shops can use BusinessLeague to grow their sales.
For example, last quarter we generated more than 704,000 sales, totalling 43.5 million euros. The top 5 categories that generated the sales looks very interesting, both in terms of sales no and sales value (and, you’ll see the winners are not the same):
Shops across these industries, whether based in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and recently in Ireland are getting promoted by affiliates on more than one market in the region, which makes it ideal for entrepreneurs looking to expand beyond the borders of their own country.
What’s the main reason it’s working?
I mentioned the efficiency and fair-play of doing business in BusinessLeague, but there’s more: Transparency. If marketing these days means hiding your numbers from the competition, what we do is that we display all the indicators for everybody. Stats, figures, trends etc. You cannot have a fair competition, or build trust in the rankings if you don’t show the data. Daily, hourly, almost real-time.
It works like a charm. Truth is people want to see how other people are doing. And they want to do better. Just like in sports – Tennis, Formula 1, you name it. A competitor will always want to compete and win. This is the future of eCommerce and it’s right here.
So if you like transparency, we got plenty. So, read the full article next, or, do reach out to us on BusinessLeague.com
For instance, we can name the best-selling products across categories and tell you that the distribution of sales across basket sizes shows that single-product purchases dominate the dataset.
More than 50% of all transactions contain only one product, representing roughly just over 50% of all baskets. Two-product baskets represent the second largest group, with approximately 18% of sales.
From three products onward, the share of sales decreases progressively:
3 products: 10%
4 products: 6%
5 products: 4%
There’s a lot of cool stuff to showcase once you realize how important transparency is. For people, for businesses, for the eCommerce market in general, where there’s always been a tendency to hide the data, not talk about it & analyze it publicly.
The product itself is strong enough, correct?
It’s better than just “enough”, to be honest. We have reached a maturity level with our product that will be able to really take us places. We know how much we earn for each sale, and for each e-shop, and that has more than doubled the last few years.
Last year for example we’ve had 876 active stores in the competition. 821 of them made sales. That’s a 94% success rate. Some use BusinessLeague as their main channel for driving sales, while others are guided through the process by Affiliate Managers and the 2Performant team to also get there.
So it makes sense for us at this moment to scale – we have the business model, we have the product, and the validation from our incredible ecosystem and investors.
Tech-wise, how do you fare against other networks?
Very solid. Currently we cover roughly 80-90% of the features major networks offer. But like I said, what really separates us from the pack is the gamified experience provided to users. It’s a game-changer.
Has it been a long journey?
Still is, but the company you’re in makes all the difference in the world. I am lucky & proud to have worked over the years with a group of tremendously talented and hard-working folks. I am constantly surprised about their creativity and devotion to this company, even though we’ve obviously had some tough times as well to get through.
You mentioned expansion and scaling.
Yes. We have just last month entered the Irish market, which is in many ways the perfect place to grow our business and the businesses there. We hired a Country Manager (cheers, Manus!) who has already signed the first merchants. Sales are happening and it’s only the beginning.