ePN Nervous Breakdown

The transition of the eBay affiliate program from Commission Junction to the in-house ePN program has not been a smooth one. In fact, I would venture to say that eBay probably had no idea of the amount of turmoil it would cause. Tracking and reporting glitches are one thing and eBay most likely anticipated some of this.

What they may not have expected was the outcry from so many of their affiliates over them.

Granted, as an ePN affiliate myself, it’s pretty stressful to think that you’re not being properly credited for the traffic you send, but it seems that a lot of the whining was just the result of low conversions for whatever reasons besides problems with click tracking.

But with such a large affiliate base as ePN has, everything is going to be multiplied many times over. So if affiliates suspect problems with commission tracking, then the collective outcry will be as deafening as it has turned out to be.

What’s compounded these glitches, is eBay’s glaring lack of communication about what’s going on with its affiliates. To eBay’s credit, they do have a forum for affiliates. I can’t think of too many other merchants who provide affiliate forums. It just strikes me that eBay is being way too measured in responding to affiliate concerns as they flare up.

And boy have they flared up!

Great gobs of wailing and gnashing of teeth will go on for days before a “pink” will weigh in with what is usually a canned response most likely carefully vetted by a team of corporate lawyers.

For the record, in the time I’ve been reading the ePN forum since that change over to the ePN program back on April 1st, I’ve garnered very little in the way of useful information regarding the program.

However, I’ve received hours of entertainment that is hard to find elsewhere.

Since the ePN program, til now, has been comparatively easy for most people to join, at least those residing in the US, it attracts a broad range of experience and intelligence levels. This is what makes the ePN forum so useless and immensely entertaining all at the same time.

Most all of what an affiliate new to ePN needs in order to get started is careful reading of the ePN TOS and “Code of Conduct” along with watching the introductory videos. This is where things breakdown immediately. When affiliates don’t bother to read the TOS documents and don’t even know how to properly create an affiliate link, then more experienced affiliates get a tad irritable.

A typcial day on the ePN forum usually involves a few posts asking how to best spam Craigslist with eBay affiliate links or why the orange RSS feed button doesn’t show when they do an advanced search on eBay.

There are several regular forum members there who take turns cutting such hapless posters off at the knees.

“Please, you whack them. No, I insist, I would be honored for you to bitch slap them.”

Then Bam! They never knew what hit them!

There was one member who was especially practiced in the fine art of newbie bashing that it was truly a thing to behold. Unfortunately he/she was run off by a groundswell of indignation by previous victims.

The board just hasn’t been the same since.

So when ePN started expiring affiliate accounts en masse on August 20th, the ensuing outcry greatly exceeded everything prior.

Also, in typical fashion, ePN waited several days before making a statement on the board.

The email that went out to the expirees was copied and pasted numerous times so I just about had it memorized. The main gist was that the traffic these unfortunate affiliates were sending to eBay was not “sufficiently engaged” once they arrived at eBay.

It would take another couple of days before ePN posted again with a clarification of what “engaged” meant as they defined it.

It was also revealed that only 300 out of the more than 90,000 registered ePN affiliates had their accounts expired. Gee, it seemed like the other way around based on the outcry on the ePN forum. Again, just further evidence that ePN’s level of communication with its affiliates is severely lacking.

So what is the future of the ePN program?

There is currently the predictable call to move to another auction platform, but that’s just pissing in the wind. As flawed as eBay may be, there’s currently no one else that can touch them.

I still have my ePN account and plan to continue building sites and driving traffic to eBay the same way I have been all along. If I should get expired down the road, then sure it would suck, but I don’t make the bulk of my income from ePN anyway. I know several of the expired affiliates did make most of their income from ePN and some have had to shut down businesses and fire employees.

Others have had to start looking for jobs. That sucks big time and I feel for these people, but on the other hand, you know what they say about eggs and baskets. This is an upside the head wake up call about how true that really is.

At this point I think eBay has poisoned the waters with their affiliates.

The degree of paranoia this recent episode has caused is evidenced by the remaining 89,700 affiliates crapping their collective pants in unison when eBay sent out the most recent edition of the ePN newsletter. Everyone thought they had just received the dreaded “email of death” notifying them that their account had been expired.

It’s almost like watching a beloved family member descend into mental illness. Not to mention how self-destructive it also seems. It almost seems like eBay is intentionally killing their affiliate program.

Or at least scaling it back significantly.

Many on the ePn forum have suggested as much and claim that why should eBay pay affiliates commissions for traffic they can already get themselves? eBay has already learned a lot over the years from their own affiliates and continue to use it against them today. Just take a look for most any Google search you can think of and have a gander at the Adwords ads on the first page of results.

See eBay anywhere among them?

“Looking for chicken gizzards? Find chicken gizzards now on eBay!”

Even Amazon isn’t this aggressive.

Is eBay imploding under its own weight?

Personally, I love the ePN affiliate program. Not because I make lots in commissions. I don’t. But because there are so many other things about it that are invaluable to me not only as an affiliate, but as an IM’er.

* With a gazillion different products and categories, eBay has an almost endless supply of products to test new markets with. I’ve discovered niches that I never would have thought about entering by testing eBay products using Adwords.

* The eBay site alone is a great place to begin your niche research. Just about every eBook on IM mentions using eBay Pulse for niche research.

* The eBay RSS listings feed is wonderful! Compared to traditional product datafeeds, RSS data feeds are so much easier to implement. No complicated conversion and database setup or expensive third party application to purchase. Granted, RSS product feeds are not as detailed as traditional datafeed files, but if you just want to get product listings on your pages fast, then RSS feeds are hard to beat. I just wish more merchants would offer them to their affiliates.

* eBay products can be stepping stones to more lucrative affiliate products from merchants outside of eBay. Again, it’s easy enough to test them at eBay first and then decide to branch out if there’s market interest.

* With the RSS datafeed, eBay editor kit, and advanced widgets, pages promoting eBay products are quick and easy to set up. Granted, there are scads of crappy eBay affiliate pages out there, but the same holds true for sites just built around traditional datafeeds. This rapid site building aspect of eBay also makes it a PPC marketer’s dream. Yes, direct linking to eBay is no longer permitted, but slapping together a mini-site is no big deal and there are plaftorms and scripts to make it even easier.

In a follow up post I’ll discuss what I see are some of the specific problems with the ePN affiliate program and how I see things playing out once the dust settles (if it ever does completely).