Low EPC For eBay Affiliate Program

I’ve been focusing on rapidly building affiliate websites based around eBay’s affiliate program and driving traffic to them using Adwords. I’ve been displaying eBay auction feeds on my pages using eBay’s RSS feeds and some code I wrote to convert the RSS XML data into formatted HTML listings. This has worked out very well in terms of rapidly generating tightly focused landing pages and also usually results in getting high Quality Scores for competitive keywords in Adwords.

This would seem like a perfect recipe for making some nice profits via Adwords to eBay. After all, with active eBay registrations now paying a juicy $25 commission combined with the 1.64% conversion rate I’m currently getting, I should be sitting pretty.

Well, I just took at look at my eBay stats in CJ and my Adwords costs so far for the month of August and I have to admit, that I was more than a little shocked. All I can say, is thank God for Adsense! It appears that I’ve been working my ass off for a pittance.

The real shocker is the EPC for eBay in my account. As of this morning, it stands at a whopping $7.75 and is sure to drop even further once today’s commissions are reported.

Now, for any other affiliate program I won’t pay for traffic unless the average payout is at least $20. Some set the cutoff even lower at $10, but quite frankly, I think even $20 is marginal. I like to have a bit more breathing room, so $30 is what I really like to shoot for.

But $7.75 EPC? Sorry, but that’s guaranteed financial suicide paying for traffic to an affiliate program that pays that little.

So why is my eBay EPC so small at the moment?

Well, for one thing, my active registrations paying $25 are only at 5 so far this month. One suspicion is that in this day and age most people most likely already have an eBay account. I just don’t think there are that many “eBay Virgins” left in the world. At least ones that are ready to make the scary leap into the alligator-infested swamp they perceive eBay to be.

I did generate quite a few sales from winning bids via my affiliate links, but I have a pretty good idea what the problem here is. Yesterday I received a commission for a single sale that netted me a .47 commission.

47 cents!!

It was for a keyless entry control and this was from a site of mine that lists items that sell on average for $9000 on eBay!

But this is typical from my experience. People will bid on things completely unrelated to the page they landed on. It’s really hard to turn a profit when people are bidding on business card holders, TOPS baseball cards, and bead kits. Why can’t they bid on farm tractors and cigar boats like they’re supposed to?!!

I’m going back into the my IM lab to take this contraption apart and I’m not coming out until I can find a way to make this business model turn a profit consistently. I know there are the components here of a profitable system that can take advantage of the relatively cheap clicks that these pages receive from Adwords.

Stay tuned…