The eBay Partner Network – Formerly managed by Commission Junction seems to be faltering…
The eBay Partner Network is the internal division of eBay now placed in charge of managing affiliates for eBay. This recent change from the Commission Junction program initially was presented as a good thing for eBay and therefore a good thing for eBay sellers.
After recent announcements of an alteration in the payment structure for eBay affiliates and reports of discrepancies in reporting by the Partner Network to its affiliates, it now appears the switch away from Commission Junction may not be the best move for eBay or its sellers.
Read More on the New Location of the Trading Assistant Journal
Thanks for the great post Scott. Great real-life examples. It’s hard to run a business without traffic. It’s also hard to love eBay and the many changes that have been brought about this year.
Hi Scott,
Not a fan of the ACRU change, as it seems unnecessarily cloudy and confusing, but overall I’m generally happy with the switch to EPN so far (at least after I changed over most of my links…that was a lot of work! Still updating some custom links).
I’ve topped what I was averaging from CJ every month so far, the payments actually reach my bank account a couple of days earlier each month (so I can now somewhat count on my EPN money as part of the kitty towards my monthly eBay bill again), and I find my way around their reports easier than I did with CJ which always confused me.
It’s still my top earner outperforming AdSense and absolutely blowing Amazon out of the water (which I still can’t understand! Amazon products are extremely relevant to my site, and they should do just as well, but it’s never been close).
Yes, I must admit I trusted the program more at CJ and was devastated at the amount of work put on my plate when the switch was announced, but so far the bottom line is even a little better so I won’t complain.
This quick change in policy (ACRU) is unsettling however. It definitely shows that the move in-house had more of a reason behind it than simply getting the program in-house. Hopefully this isn’t the first shot in a series of changes and that they can leave well enough alone for awhile now. After all, eBay seems to be focused on making buyers happy right now, hopefully they still put a premium on acquiring them.
Most interesting and extremely informative on a subject I know very little about but obviously need to know more. I do know Cliff wouldn’t lie so maybe he is producing a better quality of referral?
I do not believe for a minute this was done for any other reason than to save eBay cash outflow. It is the classic ‘trust me’ skimming the edge of bait and switch eBay play.
eBay will access its proven quality crystal ball, “the higher the expected lifetime value of the customers a publisher sends, the higher the tier the publisher will receive.” which will run on proprietary secret algorithms based on the old 10 for me and one for you ’sharing’ plan.
In the short term they will cut out the CJ layer and given the time of year it may produce substantial savings through the season with benefits 3Q & 4Q to the Marketplace divisions.
Sellers will pay for it throughout, as they pay for everything now. Food for thought – less sellers to share the bill, higher payments.
Hi Henrietta,
Yes, most of mine are pretty targeted, which is why it was such a pain for me to change the links (I think I still have old links up from the last time they changed them in CJ!). Basically tailored to my site, searches for specific movie stars by name and specific magazine titles.
I don’t get a lot of new users coming through, I mean who the hell isn’t at least registered with eBay at this point(!), but a few per year (I guess them!), so I will be curious to see what I get for them.
Cliff
We’re a marketing company driving traffic to European eBay sites and have lost 55% of our revenue since the switch. We pulled the plug almost immediately and were offered a bonus which would match what we were paid with CJ in order to continue sending 15,000 – 20,000 visitors per day, however they shorted us on the bonus as well and we have pulled the plug once again. We’ll try them again around Christmas, but in the meantime it’s better to promote Amazon or Shopping.com as they at least produce a small amount of profit. The new eBay program cannot even produce profits from Google traffic bought at 5 cents per click. There are hundreds of niche merchants which would produce an ROI of 100% or more on Google traffic purchased at 5 cents per click, but the new eBay program produced -13% ROI..
Well there goes 6 years of work.. If you look at eBay’s stock you can see that they are desperate for something to increase revenue, but they have truly failed miserably with the god awful ebay partner network.
This will go down as one of the biggest disasters in internet history.
eBay stats have been off from our own tracking ever since they start using their own system. And now they cut affiliates w/o any reason. Considering that they hold a monopoly for online auctions and all already targeted with class action suits it might be better for them not to irritate more affiliates or users.