A2 4 U

Written by Brook Schaaf

On behalf of all of us here at FMTC, I’m thrilled to announce A2, a major upgrade to our user interface at account.fmtc.co (previously A1) and the final component of our stack rebuild — a complete refactoring of our codebase that dates back to 2007. Actually, the codebase goes back to well before 2007, because FMTC was built off an early coupon site called FlamingoWorld that old-timers will remember.

What does this mean for you? Potentially a lot. Even if you don’t have so much as a freemium affiliate, merchant, or agency account, some of your most important partners probably do. With A2, we’re able to smoothly join and process multiple types of retrieved, gathered, and uploaded data. Although we process data using standard software functions and AI prompts, the core of these queues is still human judgment — applied to things like coupons, products, and programs.

As you might imagine, having done this for almost twenty years, our own process is most robust.

With A2, we’ve also externalized our internal queues into subscriber-accessible, private workflows. The first instantiation of this is called ProgramFlow, for selecting and monitoring program applications from among tens of thousands that are out there.

In a typical week, FMTC integrates hundreds of new, migrated, or reactivated programs. As any experienced affiliate operator knows, this is more than just clicking to apply and awaiting approval, because you may well be waiting for Godot. ProgramFlow retrieves and maps each relationship status daily via our longstanding MerchantSync tool, then assigns it to one of several sub-workflows. This, in turn, may lead to an escalation (a warm intro request, personal outreach, etc.) or withdrawal of the application, depending on circumstances. Different team members can share notes and view emails sent through ProgramFlow. If permitted by a program platform’s API, you can join with a single click within the interface. 

In brief, ProgramFlow is everything a team needs to successfully manage an involved process. (Shared spreadsheets simply don’t scale.) And it’s the first of much more utility and capability to come, including similar workflows for merchants and agencies. 

We hope this is of use to you. Either way, we’d love to hear your thoughts on how FMTC can better support you and the affiliate channel as a whole. We have great days ahead of us.