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A while back, I posted about the low EPC I was experiencing from the eBay affiliate program. Since then, I’ve put up some more “Mini Money Sites” (MMS) based around the eBay affiliate program. The upshot is that I’m still seeing sales trickle in for nickel and dime crap like the winning bid for a pair of Manchester United boxer shorts.

At least they weren’t used.

And this was a sale from a site that lists items at auction for 5 figures. So just what the heck is going on here?

I guess I should have woken up and smelled the coffee a long time ago, but eBay is a completely different breed of merchant than any of the others within the Commission Junction affiliate network. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, “Gee, Duh Rich!”.

OK, just bear with me a second and maybe we both can take some ideas from this post.

Unlike other merchants, eBay isn’t the kind of site most people land on and hope to get in and out quickly. It just doesn’t work that way. Sure, many people may be shopping for a particular item, but the nature of the bidding process doesn’t make it a quick process. Even the “Buy it now” buttons don’t seem to make much of a difference.

There is also the trust factor that often gets in the way of placing a bid. It would be rather foolish to place a bid for anything costing more than a few bucks without going over the item description a few times to make sure you know exactly what you’re getting. The scam about someone offering an XBox 360 box at auction is become just such an example for people to point to about the shenanigans that sometimes go on over at eBay.

So imagine if you will:

I build an eBay niche store around an item that I’ve carefully researched. It meets all my criteria for a hot selling eBay item. I see a lot of successfully completed auctions with the average selling price at or above $200. There also appears to be decent search volume for the major keywords for this niche.

So I pull the trigger, build a niche store, and start driving traffic to landing pages in the site using Adwords. Hopefully the minimum bids aren’t too high, but on average I’m paying .10 per click.

So to continue on, Mr. Web Surfer sees my ad, clicks through to my highly relevant landing page and thinks to himself, “OK, just what I’m looking for!” and clicks through to an auction listing on eBay.

At this point one of three things can happen:

1. He falls in love with the item and either buys it right then and there if there’s a “Buy it now” button, or places a bid which turns out to be the winning bid. Mr. Web Surfer is a happy customer, the eBay seller and eBay are happy, and I’m happy that I received a nice commission for the winning bid from CJ.
2. He visits eBay, but doesn’t take any action. A few days later his wife goes directly to eBay and falls in love with a darling set of Pfaltzgraff measuring cups and wins the complete set for $9.95. She can’t image her good fortune and I can’t imagine that I pay good money in Adwords to get a .25 commission for the winning bid for this transaction.
3. No action is taken on the part of Mr. Web Surfer during the 7-day eBay cookie period and everyone involved receives bupkis.

I’ll let you guess, which scenario above is the most common one in my experience.

However, within that scenario lies what I consider to be the secret to profiting nicely from the eBay affiliate program.

Over the next several months I will be laying the foundation for it, and testing its merits in the wild. Always the realist (pessimist), the enthusiasm I’m feeling right at this moment may be cruelly dashed upon the rocks of fickle consumers and a capricious behemoth of a search engine whose initials are ‘G’.

But right this very second, I’m highly stoked.

BTW: Here’s a small selection of “Manchester United Boxer Shorts” available on eBay. This is brought to you courtesy of the great BayRSS plugin: