With Q4 in full swing, I find myself thinking of ways to help my team be as efficient as possible. We have retail merchants sending us new daily deals, flash sales, or really big site wide discounts and we want the quickest way to get these into the hands of our publishers. We can quickly upload offers, knowing they are automatically updated, same day, in some cases, in the same hour, by the larger publishers we work with who have FMTC subscriptions.
“FMTC was the brainchild of Connie Berg (now Arnold), the owner of FlamingoWorld, one of the first major coupon sites. She approached Brook and Forrest Schaaf, who had Schaaf Consulting, one of the major OPMs at the time. (since sold)”
– Brook Schaff, FMTC CEO
This solution not only saves our affiliate time, but that of publishers and merchants. Read on to find out how.
“FMTC is a unique deal aggregation service that takes care of the manual, monotonous, and time-consuming work of collecting thousands of affiliate links. Not only do we gather the deals from multiple networks for you, but each deal is tested to ensure the best quality data. Let us do the heavy lifting so that you can focus on growing your business”
– Larissa Feuerstein, FMTC Merchant & OPM Liaison
I always thought FMTC stood for “For Me To Coupon”, which was the original name the company found in 2007. Over time, FMTC has evolved, changing from a focus on coupons to offering more services, explaining why FMTC now stands for “For Me To Compete.” Continuing in their entrepreneurial spirit to provide solutions to publishers, with a goal of making their lives easier, FMTC now also offers:
- Deals
- Special offers
- Holiday shipping deadlines
- Links to Clearance Pages
- Deep links (on merchant sites)
FMTC Was Created by Publishers for Publishers
Let me back up to the beginning. Connie Berg was clearly on to something when she first approached Brook and Forrest Schaaf about solving the problem of the time required for her team to manage all of the coupons promoted on her site, FlamingoWorld.
Brook did a great job of creating a datafeed solution that now provides deals for 13,346+ programs, with more being added daily. Originally created for coupons, this evolving tool is proving invaluable for enterprise-level publishers looking to provide updated coupons and offers in real time. FMTC offers a suite of tools to help publishers manage their sites more efficiently. You can try out their free trial, after which their team will follow up with you to determine the best datafeed solution for your needs.
FMTC Has Solutions for Merchants and OPMs
What started out as a tool created for publishers to receive deals has evolved and is now a solution utilized by thousands of merchants and OPMs. I reached out to Larissa Feuerstein, Merchant & OPM Liaison at FMTC and she offered a couple of best practices:
- The #1 best practice is to make sure the links for your clients are up to date in the networks, since all the deal information we have in our feed is pulled from the network APIs.
- Use your OPM/Agency account to monitor the links in our feed for your clients. This way you know if your deals are available and you can let us know if anything needs to be updated.
- When onboarding new clients, be sure to reach out to support@fmtc.co and let them know so they can apply to the program and get it integrated.
FMTC Directory
As I began digging in on FMTC and learning more about this awesome team of people who want to help publishers succeed and earn more revenue, I asked Larissa if they had any tools that were not being utilized and she pointed me to Alan Rapoport, FMTC Datafeed Client Relationship Manager who had this to say about their Directory.
“The Directory has information on all the merchants that we work with like what network they run their program in, what OPM manages their program (if any), logos and screenshots for that merchant, a Link Builder to create deep links, category information, primary country, permissions and restrictions, etc.”
– Alan Rapoport, FMTC Datafeed Client Relationship Manager
If you aren’t using this tool, I would encourage you to check them out to see how they can help you save time and earn more revenue in Q4 and beyond.
