Keeping your customers happy: how the perfect affiliate partner can triple your income

It’s always inspiring reading success stories. But how can you flourish as an affiliate yourself? Focus on building value to your audience and choose your partners carefully. Your income can increase threefold just because you found the right guys, tells Rushit Hila, the founder of Youcanic.

When you talk with Rushit, you can feel his passion for vehicles in every sentence. “I’ve always loved working on cars,” confesses the leader of one of the most popular automotive DIY platforms in the US. Youcanic now has 569,000 unique monthly visitors and is on track to make it to Alexa Top 100k websites.

How dreams come true

In fact, the whole Youcanic phenomenon started as a passion project for Rushit.

As a schoolboy, he attended a specialized school where he could choose automotive as his primary discipline, so he was able to work on cars during school.

After graduation, Rushit studied Civil Engineering and started his professional career in the field. However, he also continued working on used cars. Eventually, he got a wholesale dealer’s license and started buying, fixing, and selling used cars.

“My favorite car brand is Mercedes-Benz. It’s the car I started learning on, and I’ve always admired their engineering, not to mention the challenge of working on them. I spent a lot of time on forums, looking for answers to problems I would come up against as I worked and again and again felt frustrated about how long it took to sift through to find the best solution,” remembers Rushit.

Initially, he launched a website to share his experience of fixing MB cars. As it started bringing revenue, Rushit began adding content about other makes and models.

“I had a lot of friends who came to me for help with their cars. I knew doing the work ourselves saved them a ton of money, and I wanted to help even more people do the same. So I quit my job as a civil engineer and started Youcanic, which is now my full-time occupation,” summarizes Rushit.

The founder’s goal is to make Youcanic the most trusted site in automotive repair with step-by-step guides both for everyone from the seasoned mechanic to the novice beginner.

The perfect solution

As car guys, Youcanic members have always been using VIN decoders to look up vehicle specifications. They decided to integrate VIN decoding capability in Youcanic to make it easy for both visitors and themselves. VIN decoding seemed like one more reason to attract users to stay on the website longer.

However, the beginning was disappointing. At first, the team considered free VIN decoders, but they don’t provide the full picture. So, Youcanic began to collaborate with some paid VIN check providers. But they didn’t meet expectations. Visitors felt angry about the quality of the information they got.

Everything changed only when Youcanic established a partnership with carVertical and integrated its API in their site. Now, website visitors can look up vehicle engine type, transmission, code, features, and specifications for any car. If they consider buying the vehicle or simply need more data, they can purchase a vehicle history report from carVertical. It’s a great way to check if the car has had the odometer rolled back or has a branded title such as salvage or restored.

Rushit calls carVertical “the perfect solution.”

“We love the support that carVertical provides. cV has allowed us to keep our visitors on our site instead of sending them to other sites for decoding purposes. Income from the history report has tripled compared to our previous partner,” Youcanic’s founder highlights.

But money isn’t the only reason. Consumer satisfaction is even more critical.

“With a previous partner, we would often get emails complaining about the quality of the report. We haven’t had that complaint once since switching to carVertical, which is great considering that our visitors have purchased a few hundred history reports in just a few months,” Rushit reveals.

It’s all about your customers

Talking about the issues affiliates have to deal with, the founder of Youcanic returns to customers satisfaction: “Customer support can be a challenge. Especially when visitors are disappointed with the quality of the history reports. Luckily that has not been an issue with carVertical”.

However, his main advice for the affiliate beginners is to focus on building value for your visitors and community.

It seems the mission is what unites both carVertical and Youcanic. “carVertical’s goal is to inform car owners to make smarter buying decisions. Our goal is to empower car owners. carVertical and Youcanic focus on helping car owners, just at different stages,” Youcanic’s founder compares.

Having in mind their costumers, both companies keep perfecting their services. Among other new features on Youcanic, Rushit mentions a virtual garage that allows members to add vehicles, keep track of service records, and add pictures of them.

“We hope to continue partnering with carVertical to improve the functionality of these features. We are excited to see carVertical is working on adding more data sources to its decoder and history reports,” says Rushit.