eBay Partner Network Sends Affiliates Pink Slips
August 21, 2008 by Jon
Filed under Affiliate Programs
The eBay Partner Network (ePN) affiliate program has recently “fired” many of it’s affiliates. They were given their seven day notice and told to remove all of their affiliate links. (You can read the reactions of frustrated users and eBay’s response over on the ePN discussion board.)
Note: for the sake of full disclosure, I want to make sure and state that I’m still an eBay affiliate myself. I have not been “fired,” but I know many people who have.
The letter that “fired” affiliates received from eBay reads in part:
During a recent review of eBay Partner Network publisher accounts and site metrics data for clicks your account drives to eBay.com, we determined that the traffic generated from your account is significantly less engaged with the eBay site as compared to the standards set by our other affiliates. While we appreciate your efforts to drive traffic to our Advertiser sites, we do not think that it is mutually beneficial to further our business relationship at this time. As a result, we will be expiring your eBay Partner Network account in 7 days and we request that you remove all of your eBay Partner Network affiliate links by that time. Payment will take place as per the Network Agreement for any traffic driven to eBay Advertiser sites prior to the expiration date of August 27, 2008.
One of our account managers will contact you if a more appropriate business opportunity arises to work together again in the future.
Regards,
The eBay Partner Network
Basically, the affiliates were kicked out of the program because eBay deemed the quality of customers they were driving to eBay weren’t good enough. Apparently the problem was that these customers didn’t become repeat buyers.
Now there is a lot of anger being thrown eBay’s way by affiliates in the various forums, and that is completely understandable. People are either mad at being removed from the program when they felt they did nothing wrong, or they’re scared because while they didn’t get their pink slip today, they worry it’s only a matter of time before it’s their turn.
My Thoughts on the Situation
I don’t want to jump on the anger bandwagon and state the obvious. You can read the comments on the ePN forum for that. What I want to do is offer some of my own insights into the situation. Bear in mind that some of these insights might seem random, but trust me… they’re not. I am choosing to focus on the broader issues involved here, which are all related together, instead of elaborating on just one or two sticking points.
What type of affiliate sites have you created…
- I noticed that many BANS users have been banned, but no one on the phpBay forum has come forward saying they were affected by this. Neither tool is better than the other, but clearly it’s far too easy for the lazy affiliate to create an eBay affiliate store with BANS, whereas phpBay depends on a blog to function.
- Based on that observation, I think the days of the affiliate “e-commerce” site are over. You know… the sites that emmulate an e-commerce store, but instead of selling and shipping their own products, the items for sale are affiliate links to another site.
- Quality niche content is crucial. Not only will you drive the most targeted niche traffic to your merchant, but it will also rank well in the search engines over the long haul.
How many eggs were in that basket…
- I’m afraid that far too many eBay affiliates put all of their eggs into the eBay basket. That is, they depend on the eBay Partner Network for most–if not all–of their affiliate earnings.
- THAT IS A HUGE MISTAKE!
- The ePN Agreement states that eBay can terminate their relationship with you at any time, for any reason, within 7 days. You have no recourse, so you can’t depend solely on them for your livelihood.
- Therefore it’s crucial that you diversify your affiliate efforts… especially if you depend on your affiliate earnings to buy food and pay the mortgage. Remember there’s still merchants at Commission Junction, Linkshare, Clickbank, Amazon, and many other quality affiliate programs. If you haven’t already, it’s time you start putting your skills to work promoting affiliate products from other programs besides eBay (and you should start diversifying immediately).
It’s still okay to promote eBay products…
- If you weren’t “fired” by eBay, then you are still okay. That doesn’t mean you’ll be okay tomorrow, so be careful. However if you already have successful eBay promotions running on your sites, there’s no reason to pull them down out of fear. Simply start diversifying and be prepared should the worst happen.
- Remove your poor performing “e-commerce” style sites now before they cause you trouble. Replace them with quality niche content. If you’re not an expert in your niche, then hire others to write the content for you. Become a resource in your niche, and the traffic you send to eBay is likely to continue to weather these storms in the future.
- Sign up for the PepperJam network. Nobody at PepperJam is getting expired like they are at the ePN. So there’s always that option.
I’m sure we’ll be hearing more and more about this in the coming days, and if anything significant occurs or I have additional insights, I’ll be sure to blog about them.
In the meantime, I would love to read your comments regarding this situation…
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eBay has been on top for too long, and for no good reason. The former eBay affiliates are the only ones with the know how, drive and most importantly the marketing ability to finally bring eBay down.
Imagine an auction site where the percentage of traffic you drive to the site represents the percentage of the company that you own…
Good post and some sane advised to “diversify or die”.
The ePN cookies were great and Amazon might be an alternative provider worth considering.
It makes sense to plumb for a phpBay type site rather than an “out of the box” BANS style site now. Keep the eBay RSS feed links on there for now and get ready to terminate them and put on other links instead.
Looks like Google Adsense might become my best mate again soon!
Read Tao’s last blog post: Run Fat Boy Run
eBay has offered some additional clarification on what they’re looking for from affiliates:
My take on this is that they want us to continue driving our site’s visitors to eBay, with the result being that our site’s visitors make repeat purchases over time. So for example, if your site’s visitors were interested in power tools, your site would somehow compel your visitors to click on affiliate links and buy many power tool related items from eBay over time.
Apparently what they don’t want are sites that act as doorways or introductions for customers to eBay. You know, the sites where the point is to funnel people to eBay who otherwise wouldn’t have considered buying from there, and then passing those customers off to eBay.
If this is the case, then to succeed as an eBay affiliate, we’ll have to build sites that are not only full of quality content and information, but sites that attract a reader base. We’ll need to have loyal readers who visit our sites often, trust our recommendations, click on our affiliate links, and therefore become repeat eBay buyers.
That will be no small task for many affiliates…
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