Effective April 1, 2008, eBay opened the doors to their new in-house affiliate program. Previously, the eBay affiliate program had been managed by Commission Junction (CJ) with all link tracking performed by eBay. That’s what all those canine sounding affiliate links were about:
“rover”
A transition period has been in effect during the entire month of April, where eBay affiliate links for both CJ and ePN would be active. As an added incentive for early migration to ePN, eBay is offering an extra 5% on commissions generated during April.
Effective May 1, 2008, the CJ links will go dead and only actions generated from the new ePN links will be compensated.
So please take a moment and ponder the angst this changeover has created for eBay affiliates.
I’ve only been an (active) eBay affiliate for about a year. I began in earnest after joining Dennis Becker’s Earn1KaDay.com membership site and began implementing his “Mini Money Site” system (MMS). In addition, I’ve also created a product based on the eBay affiliate program, which uses the eBay RSS product feed and FlexTool links. So the migration to ePN has hit me with a double whammy — both as an affiliate and as a product developer.
Many eBay affiliates have taken the cautious approach and are waiting until the last minute to convert over to ePN. The reasoning being to let eBay work out the kinks in the new program prior to committing to it. Unfortunately, having a product that would need to eventually work with ePN links, I haven’t been afforded the luxury of taking my time in making the switchover.
Having customers anxious for an updated version of my product is also a strong motivating factor.
All in all, making the necessary updates to my scripts that use the RSS feed and FlexTool links wasn’t all that painful. I was able to get an update to customers on April 1 though I did have to issue a few interim updates to fix some bugs and oversights on my part, but all seems to working as it should at this point.
I was on edge for the first few days until commissions began being logged into my ePN account. It certainly didn’t help matters to read the desperate posts on the eBay affiliate forum about low or non-existent commissions. The sparse communication from eBay support on the forums also hasn’t done much to alleviate a lot of this anxiety. The replies from eBay support have essentially been stock responses to the effect that everything is fine and dandy.
Perhaps I’m a bit too trusting, but I have to assume that with all the Beta testing eBay did with the ePN tracking prior to release, combined with the talented technical team I know they have in place, that this thing is ready for prime time.
Of course, having spent 20 years in the tech arena, I also know how things can go terribly wrong despite months of careful testing.
All I know is that the links I updated for my own sites and product appear to be correctly tracking and the EPC is very close to what I had at CJ, which is just a shade above pitiful.
I’m currently waiting to the last few days of April to convert the links on all my other eBay sites over to ePN. A chore I’m not looking forward to, but one I know I can crank out in 2-3 days, and once it’s done I can move on. Though I have the utmost sympathy for those eBay affiliates with tons of pages that need updating. And if you’re using the eBay Editor Kit, then search and replace is your best friend.
on May 26th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
The cutover deadline has new been extended to the end of May. I first dismissed the paranoia as people who didn’t know what they were talking about. However my statistics also show a decrease in conversion rates over a 2,000+ visitor base. If there is an issue, deliberate or otherwise, with sales not being reported (and paid) how would we know it? eBay certainly has motivation to not fix any such issue.
on May 26th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Hi Joe, yes the extension to May 1st for the cut-over was welcome. I’ve been monitoring the eBay affiliate forums and it’s pretty hard to ignore the large number of affiliates claiming that their conversions are down from CJ – in particular their ACRUs.
I’m not currently receiving too much traffic to my eBay affiliate sites to have enough data to say either way. And you’re right, we really have no way of knowing for sure if there’s a problem or not with eBay’s reporting.
Despite the fact that eBay did several months of beta testing with ePN prior to April 1st, it was somewhat of an artificial test since it did not simulate the current load being placed on the system.
We may never know the full extent of any problems even after the dust of the transition settles.
Rich