The Macy’s Affiliate Program | Department Store Monetization

In this post, I’m going to examine the Macy’s affiliate program.

I’ll examine the commission structure, what you can promote, promotional strategies and some keyword research if you want to monetize with Macy’s.

About Macy’s

According to Wikipedia, “Macy’s (originally R. H. Macy & Co.) is an American department store chain founded in 1858 by Rowland Hussey Macy…As of 2015, Macy’s was the largest U.S. department store company by retail sales. As of February 2019, there were 584 full-line stores with the Macy’s nameplate in operation throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Its flagship store is located at Herald Square in the Manhattan borough of New York City. The company had 130,000 employees and earned annual revenue of $24.8 billion as of 2017.”

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Joining

Macy’s affiliate program is managed by Rakuten.

So if you already have a Rakuten account, Just search for Macy’s and then click apply. Otherwise, you will have to create a Rakuten account. Check out their affiliate program page for more information.

How Much Can You Earn?

Inside of Rakuten, the Macy’s affiliate program terms say that they pay “3 % commission {For all products not covered in specific SKU Lists}, 0 % commission [Macy’s Apple SKUs – 0%] on selected goods is offered to you on items purchased by visitors who are referred to us from your site.”

Basically, they pay 3% Commission on everything except Apple products which are non-commissionable.

What Can You Promote

If you check out their affiliate partner page, they list off a bunch of big name, designer brands that you can promote.

For example, if you’re looking to monetize with Nike products, if you read my affiliate program review for Nike, you’ll see that it really isn’t operational, at the time of this writing.

As a workaround, you can promote Nike products that Macy’s has in stock.

Popular Brands

Calvin Klein, DKNY, Kenneth Cole, Ralph Lauren, Levi’s, Sean John, Marc Ecko Cut & Sew, Nautica, Nike, Puma, Adidas, The North Face, Timberland, Tommy Hilfiger, Waterford, MICHAEL Michael Kors, BCBG, Betsey Johnson, French Connection, Guess, Lucky Brand Jeans, Dr. Martens, Steve Madden, Cole Haan, Hugo Boss, Lacoste, Stacy Adams, Roxy, Fossil.

Exclusive brands available only at Macy’s: Alfani, American Rag, Charter Club, INC International Concepts, Martha Stewart Collection, Tools of the Trade and Hotel Collection (Source).

What You Can’t Promote

*Qualified sales exclude: gift cards, phone orders, macysweddingchannel.com and furniture/mattress categories (Source).

Keyword Research

A good way to get a sense of the different products Macy’s offers that you can monetize is to use my favorite SEO software Ahrefs.

Below, I extracted 1,000 of Macy’s top-performing organic keywords, with the term “Macys” filtered out. This way, you can see the exact products and brands the website ranks for without the Clutter of branded Search terms:

You can see that they have some great rankings: plus size clothes, dresses, Nike shoes, bomber jacket, men’s watches, maternity clothes, and more:

1. coach
2. finish line
3. prom dresses
4. coach
5. shoes
6. polo
7. lingerie
8. plus size clothing
9. dresses
10. tommy hilfiger
11. nike shoes
12. dooney and bourke
13. clarks shoes
14. swimsuits
15. estee lauder
16. polo
17. dress barn
18. bomber jacket
19. panties
20. finish line
21. tommy hilfiger
22. luggage
23. finishline
24. plus size dresses
25. clark shoes
26. coach outlet
27. dockers
28. maxi dresses

SEO Opportunities

If I were to approach promoting Macy’s, I would target some of the lower difficulty keywords in this table and build-out long-form, 1,500 + word content optimized for a single primary keyword term.

For example, if I wanted to target the term pencil dress, I would use Ahrefs to discover all of the long tail keyword variations of this term and build out a page that he thematically incorporates them.

I might choose to structure the site around men’s fashion, perhaps men’s workwear. I would want the site to have a certain focus and not be overbroad.

It’s easier to build an email list, for example, if your site appeals to a certain segment specifically rather than try to appeal to everyone at the same time.

That said, you could probably create a rank and bank fashion style site that just targets every possible, easy to rank fashion term.

At this point in my internet marketing life, I’m more interested in building websites with diversified traffic sources that genuinely serve readers.

Site Ideas

I wouldn’t necessarily start a website just to monetize with Macy’s, but if you have fashion traffic, for example, it might be worth experimenting to see how it converts.

Say you run a wedding blog and you have a post on maternity clothes. You could run a test (create a deep URL with Rakuten) to see if your readers will convert on Macy’s maternity products:

As you can see from the screenshot, Macy’s has a robust category page for expectant mothers. As a publisher, it’s nice to see a thoughtfully considered landing page like this.

A lot of times, even with bigger brand retailers, they sometimes neglect the personal touch. That means that traffic won’t convert as well, usually. On this product category page, you can see that Macy’s gives expectant mothers the option to shop by trimester and something called “bump-forward” styling.

If you like Macy’s affiliate terms and you don’t have any existing content you can experiment with, I would use the keyword research table I provided above or do your own using Ahrefs to discover low Keyword Difficulty terms that Macy’s ranks for that you can also rank for.

For example, the term “free people dresses” has a keyword difficulty of 1 and a search volume of 16,000. That would be an example of a term I would consider producing some content around if I was gunning for organic traffic to push to Macy’s.

The term “bomber jacket men” Gets 23,000 searches a month and has a keyword difficulty of three. It’s yet another example of a low difficulty term you might be able to rank for and then monetize with Macy’s affiliate links.

Pinterest

I don’t personally do much with social media, but it would make sense if you have a fashion-based Pinterest Account to experiment sending traffic to Macy’s.

Or you can send the traffic to your website and then push it to Macy’s from there.

A Macys Affiliate Site Example

With Pinterest on my mind, I used this e visual search engine went to search for “Macy’s fashion”, and I found this pin:

Which lead to this website (FashionWanderer) that’s using the Macy’s affiliate program to monetize. It’s a good example of the sort of content that plays well on social and can potentially do well organically:

Though, this particular piece of content is optimized for social as it doesn’t really coalesce around a particular organic keyword.

If you want some Pinterest inspiration, I would suggest building out some Boards and Pins around some of the big keywords in my keyword research table at the top of the page.

For example, there’s a ton of search volume for terms like pencil skirts, Versace cologne, cold shoulder tops, cama beach dresses, wrap dresses, etc:

Managing Affiliate Links

One thing you should pay attention to, fashion products tend to go out of stock or they might get discontinued.

What happens when this occurs? Your affiliate link might 404, or it might go to an out-of-stock product page, or maybe Macy’s redirects it to a product category page if you are lucky.

The point being, you need to stay on top of your affiliate links.

I use the ThirstyAffiliates WordPress plugin to manage and track my affiliate links.

If a link breaks, you will get an alert and you can easily redirect all instances of it if you need to.

That said, it is a bit of a hassle tracking these things and if a product goes out of stock, you won’t necessarily get an alert, but at least it will be easier to redirect all links to that page to a different page so that you can get back to monetizing quickly.

Summing Up

If you are a fashion blogger, Macy’s is a solid option for monetization. They have so many different brands under their umbrella that it’s an effective back doorway to affiliate yourself with different fashion brands that may not have their own affiliate programs.

Last Updated on March 14, 2021 by Ryan Nelson