eBay PartnerNetwork Blog

This month’s edition of Search Engine Marketing Journal includes a white paper we contributed on what we think the next big step will be for the affiliate marketing industry:  a focus on quality.  As you all know, we’ve already made changes to do just that including the value-based ACRU pricing structure in the US. The results have been promising, and we’ve highlighted some of them in the SEMJ paper:  http://www.semj.org/documents/SEMJ_ebay_vol2.pdf

Rewarding quality has not just had a positive impact for eBay, but for many of our affiliates as well who are now earning higher ACRU commissions under the value-based system than they were under the volume-based structure. Affiliates who work to attract the right kind of traffic and engage their audience will earn higher rewards even if they aren’t among the biggest affiliates out there. 

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject and the paper. Send us a tweet at eBay_affiliates with a comment or link to your blog post. We’ll post some of our favorites (good and bad) here in an upcoming post.

Thanks!

The eBay Partner Network Team

Hi Everyone,

We wanted to provide an update on cleanup work we’re doing on dormant accounts that have had no traffic after an extended period of time. Note that this is not an expiration of any active accounts. The reason that we’re doing this cleanup work is because many of these old dormant accounts were created before the new application screening procedures were in place and while the vast majority of them have remained dormant, on the occasions when we see these accounts activate, by and large we see fraudulent behavior. Policing these accounts takes our resources away from working proactively with our good publishers. In addition, there is a growing black market for ePN accounts so we want to mitigate the risk of these being traded and again be used to defraud ePN, which hurts not just us, but hurts our good affiliates as well.

I’m sure there are a number of folks who may have created accounts and forgotten about them or never gotten around to building their businesses, which is why we’re posting in addition to sending 3 day expiration emails to each dormant account that is being closed.  Moving forward, we’re changing our processes to instead start sending reminder activation emails to new account owners when we don’t see any activity, and we will include a note that the account will be closed if there is no activity for an extended period. Along with the application vetting that we introduced last year, this is another step in actively maintaining eBay Partner Network so that we can better focus our efforts on our best affiliates rather than policing accounts that carry a greater risk of fraud.

Thanks for supporting eBay Partner Network.

eBay has recently launched www.Worldofgood.com in the US.  This site facilitates business in very rural and poor areas of the world acting as a broker and requiring that ‘artisans’ receive equitable payment for their baskets, pottery, and wares.

This site now works with the eBay Partner Network, so if you send traffic to WorldofGood.com using US program affiliate links, and that traffic converts or signs up, you will earn commissions.  We recommend that you use a different campaign IDs for your World of Good placement, so you can track performance.

An important note here is that selling fees are NOT waived or donated as they are with charitable auctions on our site.  This means that commissions earned through World of Good purchases should be roughly the same as on eBay.  These items are not like charity items, where the selling fees are often little or nothing.

You can use the link generator to develop links to send traffic to different areas of WorldofGood.com and there are also separate APIs for the World of Good website.