In an increasingly competitive e-commerce ecosystem, where users are looking for the best offers and brands are looking for effective promotion channels, trust becomes an essential element. Affiliate marketing has an important advantage: it is a performance-based model in which advertisers pay for concrete results — generated sales and real customers. But for this ecosystem to work, every party involved must bring value: advertisers through competitive offers and active communication, publishers through relevant traffic and quality content, and networks by connecting the right partners.
An interesting example is VIARdigital, a project that started in Romania with a clear mission: to turn the experience of using discount coupons into one based on trust and real benefits. Bogdan Arhip is the co-founder of VIARdigital, the umbrella project building the next generation of coupon platforms: real savings for shoppers and real sales for merchants. It all started in Romania with Cuponescu.ro, from a personal frustration — too many coupon websites display expired or incorrect codes, and that has made an entire category viewed with distrust. Bogdan started from the opposite principle: only tested and active coupons, so that users come back because the last one worked. The model worked, and from there came the ambition to replicate it regionally.
Today, VIARdigital is active in six markets — Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Poland, France, and the United States — all built on the same principles. Before affiliate marketing, Bogdan spent more than 15 years in business development and channel partnerships for software companies, experience that now shapes the way he builds relationships with advertisers and affiliate networks.
Interview with Bogdan Arhip, co-founder of VIARdigital
How did you identify the opportunity to build this project?
The opportunity came from my own experience as a coupon user. Too often, I came across expired codes, outdated information, or simply incorrect details. That creates exactly the frustration and negative feedback that surrounds the entire coupon-site category. I realized the problem was not demand, but quality. Users want to save money, but they do not trust that they will actually succeed. That is where I saw the opening. We started in Romania with Cuponescu.ro, built on a simple principle. That means users come back because the last time they used a coupon from us, it worked. That is the strongest form of marketing you can have – the trust that it is worth checking with us first before any online purchase.
Once we saw that the model worked in Romania, we realized that the same problem and the same opportunity existed across the region. That is how VIARdigital was born, the umbrella project through which we bring the same principles to multiple countries. Today we are active in six markets: Romania (cuponescu.ro), Bulgaria (kuponovo.bg), Greece (kouponakis.gr), Poland (rabatarnia.pl), France (codedereduc.fr), and the United States (brokebutsmart.com). Each is built on the same idea: verified coupons, real benefit, and trust that brings the user back.
What was the biggest challenge in the first year of operation?
Prioritization. When you build a new business, you have limited resources and endlessly many things that seem urgent — content, SEO, relationships with networks, advertising, social media. The hardest part was constantly deciding where it was worth putting time and budget in order to gain real traction, not just activity. Closely connected to that was calibrating spending budgets: how much to invest in growth without burning through resources before the first results arrived. It was a constant exercise in balancing patience with financial discipline — especially because we are replicating the model in several countries at the same time, where each market has its own pace and its own start-up costs.
What makes the difference between a good advertiser and an excellent one from a publisher’s point of view?
Active communication. A good advertiser gives you access to the program; an excellent one treats you as a partner — informs you about promotions in advance, sends you new codes, and provides updated materials. For us, fresh content is the heart of this type of promotion. Without a constant flow of new offers and codes, a store page quickly becomes static and loses value for both the user and the advertiser. The best advertisers understand one more thing: we send traffic that converts two to three times better than the store average, because the user reaches them already decided to buy. The partner who communicates actively is able to make the most of exactly this type of traffic.
What type of support from the affiliate network helped you the most in developing the project?
Mediating relationships with advertisers we could not reach directly. There were programs where the door seemed closed — either we received no response, or we could not reach the right person. The network opened those conversations, and today some of them are among our best-performing collaborations. As we expand into more countries, this role becomes even more valuable: a network with regional presence and local teams helps us enter new markets much faster than we could on our own, with access to relevant advertisers in each country. That “connector” role of the network had a disproportionately large impact compared with the effort involved.
What technical challenges do you most often encounter when working with advertisers?
The most frequent ones are related to tracking and attribution. I often see situations where order deduplication is unclear, transaction validation is heavily delayed, or cookie windows are too short and do not realistically reflect purchasing behavior. On top of that, there are incomplete or rarely updated product feeds, which make it harder for us to keep offers accurate in real time. And the biggest challenge by far remains the lack of tracking in mobile applications.
What technical improvements would you like to see advertisers implement more often?
Tracking in mobile applications. More and more advertisers heavily promote their own apps and push users toward installation, but there is no attribution for what those users do once they are inside the app. In practice, we send quality traffic that converts — but in the app, the conversion becomes invisible, and the publisher is not credited for the sale. As the share of mobile commerce grows, this gap becomes increasingly costly for publishers. A correctly implemented deep-link tracking setup, together with solid server-to-server measurement, would be the most valuable technical improvement an advertiser could make for partners like us.
What categories or types of offers currently generate the best results?
Discount codes with real value. An authentic, meaningful discount — not a promotion created just for the sake of having something displayed. Users immediately recognize the difference between a “real benefit” and a cosmetic discount; the first generates conversions and trust, while the second erodes exactly the reputation we are trying to build. In short: the quantity of offers matters less than the quality and real value of each code.
Are there any myths about coupon websites that you would like to debunk?
The most persistent myth is that “there are no valid coupons” and that users do not get any real benefit. This perception is fueled precisely by websites that display old or expired codes. That is exactly why we started the project: to prove that users can obtain a real and verifiable economic benefit through Cuponescu.ro — and, through VIARdigital, in every country we enter. Every tested code that works is evidence against this myth — and over time, it rebuilds trust in an entire category.
Was there a moment when you realized the project had real growth potential?
When the first affiliate commissions started coming in (smile). Joking aside, that was the validation moment: proof that the model works, that users really do buy through our recommendations, and that advertisers receive real sales. The first commission is not just about money — it is confirmation that everything we had built up to that point had real demand behind it. The second such moment came when we replicated the model outside Romania and saw that it worked just as well in a completely different market. That was when we knew we were not building just one website, but a model that could scale.
What trends in e-commerce and performance marketing are you watching most closely?
I am watching several directions in particular. The first is the growing role of AI in product discovery: more and more users are starting their searches through conversational assistants and LLMs instead of Google, and OpenAI has already announced direct shopping features in ChatGPT. This will fundamentally change how coupon websites are found, indexed, and cited — and it is something we are actively preparing for. The second is the shift of commerce toward mobile and apps, with everything that means for tracking and attribution. The third is the consolidation of attribution beyond last-click. Above all of this, the underlying trend we are betting on most is the need for trust. In an increasingly crowded and automated landscape, the brand that consistently offers a real benefit will win — and that is exactly what VIARdigital is building on, market by market.
