Fashion affiliate marketing: Stylight’s performance model

Interview of Yves Ruffet – Lead Partner Growth DACH & FR, Stylight

    Hello Yves, thank you for agreeing to answer our questions and to explain your market positioning.  

Can you quickly present Stylight and its positioning? And your role within this structure?

  Stylight is the world’s leading search platform for fashion, beauty and home furnishings. Since 2008, we have been helping online consumers in 16 countries around the world discover over 1,500 online shops at once and compare prices for over 50,000 brands.

By redirecting users directly to partner e-commerce sites, Stylight plays a strong role in fashion affiliate marketing, driving traffic, direct sales, and brand awareness.
My role is to lead partner growth in the DACH region and France, working with large international retailers as well as iconic and emerging brand

What are Stylight’s strengths compared to other markets ?

  The brands and retailers we work with often appreciate Stylight’s ability to meet their traffic volume expectations, while listing their products in a visually appealing environment. In addition to the standard listing of their products on our search pages, our partner shops receive additional visibility in the magazine section of our site. In addition, our teams provide personalised account management to each partner, allowing them to benefit from their market expertise and valuable advice in each region where we operate.  

How does Stylight select advertisers for its fashion affiliate marketing strategy? (sectors of activity, size of advertisers, minimum traffic, positioning…)

  We work with advertisers in three main segments: fashion, home furnishings and beauty. For brands with a luxury or premium positioning, we also offer two dedicated sections on our site: the Luxury Loft and Premium Loft.

In terms of the size of the advertisers we work with, we work with specialist brands with hundreds of products, but also with large retailers with millions of products. Before starting any partnership with a new online shop, our experts will arrange an initial telephone discussion with the store to assess the potential of a partnership and to develop a plan to ensure its success.  

What is Stylight’s pricing (how are the CPCs defined for each sector?)

Stylight has been a CPC platform since the very beginning, and we have over 14 years of experience in achieving results with this model. CPCs vary depending on the segment (fashion, home decor or beauty) and the device from which clicks are generated. Our account managers discuss the appropriate rate with each shop wishing to list their products on Stylight. Our partners can also customise their CPCs for the product categories of their choice through our CPC bidding system. We also offer a 4-week trial period to each new partner, allowing them to test our platform with a limited minimum amount.  

If you had to give advice to a brand that is hesitating to launch itself on a comparison site like Stylight, what would be your arguments to convince them?

My advice would be: start small and test. The trial period allows brands to list their best-performing products in a key market and measure results without risk. I would advise them to list, for one or two months, only their best performing products, and in one of the markets in which they are already established, in order to be able to evaluate our platform properly. With the support of our teams, brands can quickly see how fashion affiliate marketing via Stylight delivers relevant traffic and scalable growth. Over time, many partners integrate Stylight as a core pillar of their international acquisition strategy.