eBay PartnerNetwork Blog

Hello All,

We’d like to tell you about a great event we’re holding June 16th-18th called eBay DevCon!

What is the eBay and PayPal Developers Conference?
The eBay PayPal Developer’s Conference (DevCon) is a three day gathering of the minds for those seeking education, inspiration and networking. The conference this year will be held in San Jose, CA.

The main focus of the event is teaching publishers how to better integrate our API and other technologies to help all sides build more profitable and mutually beneficial relationships. Affiliates who have attended eBay’s DevCon in the past have told us it’s been a great way to see what other developers are up to and get an exclusive glimpse of what’s on tap for the eBay and Pay Pal developer programs in the next 6-24 months.

Who should attend eBay’s DevCon?
All publishers, large and small, who want to learn more about eBay’s unique tools, technologies and API’s.  Whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned veteran, there’s something for everyone at DevCon.

How do I find out more?
Want to get involved?  Get started with the eBay Developers Program and PayPal Developers Central today.  If you’re looking for further details, take a look at the tentative eBay DevCon schedule here, as well as a list of confirmed speakers here.   Please note the June 16th pre-conference workshops are an additional $50.  Register on or before April 30th, 2009 to receive the $99 early bird special.   eBay’s DevCon is held at eBay’s North campus in San Jose, just minutes from the San Jose airport.  See maps and directions to the event here.

Hope to see many of you there!

The eBay Partner Network

Hello All,

A lot has happened since we first launched eBay Partner Network on April 1st, 2008.  From migration to the development of new tools and reports to our focus on quality traffic, we have appreciated your feedback through customer service, our boards, and in our personal interaction with many of you via e-mail and at conferences.

In an effort to get even more feedback from an even larger number of our publishers, we have started sending out the first ever eBay Partner Network Survey.  If you receive an invitation email please take the time to participate.  Your opinions are extremely valuable, and will help us to improve the eBay Partner Network platform, services, and program offerings.

Your responses are confidential and we will not ask for any personal information or login details to complete the survey.  Please see our privacy policy for complete details.

We plan to continue making significant investments in the program and our affiliates.  This is your chance to weigh in and have a say in the direction we’re heading.  If you have any questions or comments regarding the survey please email us at: eBayPartnerNetwork-survey@eBay.com

Kind regards,

The eBay Partner Network Team

The latest eBay Partner Network release is scheduled for March 24th and focuses on new features to enhance Security and provide New and Improved Tools!

We are continuing to strengthen our Security features to help keep your private information guarded.  New and existing publishers will be prompted to select and answer 3 Security Questions when logging in to eBay Partner Network.  Then we will require that users correctly answer one of these security questions when accessing sensitive information in their accounts.  This new Security feature should help prevent unauthorized changes from being made to a user’s account.  We would also like to remind everyone to take the proper precautions to keep your information safe and follow these best practices.

Now to the more exciting stuff.

We know that the old process for creating RSS Feeds was not very smooth, so we made an investment to really improve the RSS Generator and streamline the create flow.  Publishers will now be able to select their campaign name or ID from a dropdown menu, select their search criteria, view a preview of the results, and create the RSS link – right from your eBay Partner Network account!

Here’s a screenshot of how the new RSS Generator will look:

The second feature is a brand new tool we’re making available.   Now publishers can request access to eBay Product Data Feeds!  Data Feeds allow you to download a large amount of eBay listing data and cache it in your own system. They’re great for high-volume applications like shopping comparison sites, deals sites, loyalty programs, and large portals. If you are approved for access to the data feeds, caching eBay listings in your own database will allow you to scale your application up much more than you could by using the API alone. Combine one or more data feeds with API calls for even more possibilities!

Who should use Data Feeds?

Data Feeds are meant for anybody running a high-volume site — a site that can’t work within the 1.5 million API calls per day limit. You should also have a strong programming background to successfully download the feed files, load them into your own database, and build an application that will take advantage of the large amount of data.

To submit a request to use Data Feeds please send us an email answering these questions:

1. What is your ePN account username?
2. What is your registered email address?
3. What is your primary business model?
4. What site do you plan to use for your Data Feeds integration project? Please include a URL. If you are integrating our feeds into an existing application, the URL should point us to a page with that application. If you have not built your application yet, please describe it.
5. How many unique users do you expect to use your site/application per month?
6. Are you already getting feeds from other advertisers?
7. What is your eBay Developer’s ID? (If you have one)

Once we approve your request, you’ll see a new Data Feeds icon under the Tools Tab in your account.

Here’s a screenshot of how this will look and the options available to select and download specified feeds:

Well that’s it for this release.  We hope you find these new features helpful and as always we welcome your feedback.

Cheers,

The eBay Partner Network

We’ve received lots of great feedback on the white paper on quality in affiliate marketing that we published with SEMJ. The issue will be sent out in hard copy to their subscribers next week. We were invited to do an interview on Bruce Clay’s SEM Synergy show on Webmaster radio, which ran last week. You can listen to the full show, which includes an interview with Sean Golliher from SEMJ, here. We also heard from affiliates and others via Twitter (follow us on twitter) and comments posted on other blogs and forums. Here are just a few of the comments:

Pat Grady from RhinoFish says:

“This is an excellent paper. It’s short, sweet and to the point. I wish it contained more details about how they are discerning incrementality, some of their metric ideas are decent, others aren’t as correlated once the underlying mechanics are understood. I’m happy to see eBay leading the investigation of quality, they’re on the right track but still do have a ways to go. I compliment them on being willing to discuss (publish) this information and more in regards to their experimentation, policies and the things driving both.”

Sonia says:

“I have been bumped up to the $40 ACRU level since January so I guess according to eBay’s standards, I’m bringing in quality visitors. Last year I was focused on quantity instead of quality, but have turned things around and started focusing on adding content to existing sites instead of building more and I’m starting to see better results because of it.”

- Congratulations, Sonia! We’re glad to hear that the quality over quantity focus is working for you.

Sallie from Affiliate-Marketing-Adventure says:

“I like the fact that in the paper they acknowledge that small affiliates can outperform large affiliates in terms of traffic quality. This is attributed to the “great care” we put into our web sites. That’s something I’ve believed all along – as I’ve said before, “content is queen!”

- Sallie, this is exactly what we’ve been finding. Feedback has been great from smaller affiliates who are earning more money by focusing on the quality of their content. Affiliate marketing is a two-way street: the more we can help our affiliates improve their performance, the better we both get paid.

Alan from Affiliate Confession had a few criticisms for us:

“While I’m sure the data gathered by eBay in the last several months as outlined in the above mentioned report has been helpful in peering into the activities of affiliates and helped them better adjust their pricing structures in paying these affiliates, it is woefully incomplete and somewhat flawed. I say this for several reasons but the biggest is that they have not been running their affiliate program and gathering data long enough to really understand what’s going on… Affiliates don’t know how much they will be receiving for these new eBay members until the 10th of the following month that they are created in. This makes it difficult for the affiliate to keep track of their revenue actually earn from eBay…Can you really determine what a new member is going to do for their lifetime with such a small slice of their activity?”

- Alan, we appreciate your feedback. Please do keep it coming. While it may seem as though we only started gathering data after the move to an in-house network, we’ve actually been collecting and analyzing data for years. Moving to an in-house affiliate network gave us much more rich data, and confirmed much of what we had been hypothesizing previously. With the overall size of our affiliate programs, we have a huge amount of data and a top-notch analytics group that is making sure that the analysis and algorithms we use are very robust.  While no prediction method is 100% perfect we’re extremely pleased that we’re able to reliably differentiate quality across our affiliates and reward people for it appropriately.  We’re going to continue to work on refining our pricing algorithms as we go.  In regards to the timing for valuing the ACRUs on the 10th of each month, we’re working on ways to improve on that so that affiliates have more real-time feedback.

Thanks to everyone for their feedback on the paper and campaign. All of your comments – positive and negative – help us make the program better. Feel free to post more comments or send us feedback directly at twitter We’ll do our best to get back to everyone in a timely manner.

Thanks!

eBay Partner Network