Introducing Chad Wehrmaker and his thoughts on future of EPN

April 7th, 2010 | eBay Partner Network Team

Hi all,

Chad WehrmakerYou may have read last week that I’ll be taking on the role of head of the eBay Partner Network team globally. I’m deeply honored and excited to be given the opportunity to improve on what I think is already a good affiliate program.

A little background on me: I’ve been at eBay for more than six years and have been working in eCommerce for more than ten. I’ve worked in the affiliate industry since 2007, when I joined eBay Partner Network to build up the Network Quality team (before that I was part of eBay’s Natural Search team). In 2008, I assumed broader responsibility for business operations, including managing Analytics and Customer Support.

I am very proud of what we’ve accomplished as a team here at eBay Partner Network. All of you should know that there are a lot of people working hard here every day to make the network even better, and we have some exciting things planned for 2010 and beyond. Over the next couple of years, we’ll be very focused on empowering and enabling publishers, and the March 30th release was a sign of things to come.  Enhancements to the overall user interface, improved help content and a new landing page report were all part of this most recent release.  Our goal is to improve your ability to work with your campaigns, optimize your traffic and ultimately improve your results, and we have a number of new features planned to help make this easier for you.

We understand that some of the changes we’ve made since bringing our program in-house have affected the way many of you work with eBay. We’ve put more of an emphasis on quality, and this won’t change: paying for high quality traffic is the only way we can maintain a program of this size and reward the best publishers as much as possible for what they do. I know that for many of you, driving high-quality traffic to eBay means having to work harder to ensure you target the right people and really help them find the great deals they’re looking for. The team here appreciates your extra effort and we want you to know that we are dedicated to helping you succeed.

This year you can expect to see from us more investment in account management, online education and development of better tools. We’re confident that this will manifest itself in improved lines of communication, more information and improved technical solutions to allow you to make further strides in your business. Along these lines, please take the time to look over all of the great resources that we have on the blog. We will continue to use this medium as a way to help you succeed, so stay tuned for more news and education.

Finally, a healthy affiliate program requires that both merchant and affiliates work together to help each other become successful. As we move forward with these plans, we will continue to need your feedback and effort to help make this a rewarding program for everyone. I’m going to set up a thread on the discussion board in the next few days, which the team and I will be monitoring, so if you‘ve seen areas for improvement, let us know. And, of course, if you want to give us some positive feedback, please do so. We like hearing that too!

To all of you, whether you have been working with us over the years or are newer to the program, I’d like to say thanks for your dedication to eBay. Without you this program wouldn’t exist and we wouldn’t have the opportunities we have ahead of us today. I look forward to working with you all in the years ahead!

Thanks,

Chad

  • Jeff

    Welcome to the team Chad!

    I am also looking forward to the years ahead. Thats a good idea to setup a thread for suggestions.

    Jeff

  • notmuchadoaboutnothing

    “This year you can expect to see from us more investment in account management, online education and development of better tools.”
    I hope so, especially account management. Most of the time (or so it feels) contacting an ePN CSR yields a response along the lines of “I’ll pass that along to the appropriate team and they’ll get back to you” — which they RARELY do. It’s like doing you-now-what in the wind. It would be so nice to have an account rep to communicate with, someone to whom I’m assigned and with whom I can follow up. It would also be nice if the font size in these comments boxes were larger – we have asked for that before, but nothing has changed.
    In any event, as someone whose QCP experience is as good as, and sometimes better than, the old system, I’m mostly a happy camper. Looking forward to the improvements. Thank you.

  • http://www.Deals2save.net Ed

    How about a ready made site that all you have to do is plug in your campaign ID ?

  • Harmjan

    Congrats and good luck with your new job Chad! Looking forward to the new plans ahead of us.

  • http://www.boardgamebeast.com Ashley Cotter-Cairns

    Why not make some of your tools (ex. Custom Banner) able to “detect” a keyword on a page the way Google Adsense can and display eBay listings which suit? This would save me hours of time creating individual custom banners for every different board or card game we write about.

  • Adam

    I just read over some of the comments here about making things simpler and at first glance they all seem to be decent idea’s but after you sit down and think about it, you guys have to realize it probably won’t happen.

    First off Ed, with the thousands of ePN publishers around it would be nearly impossible to create a website for each of them and even if the ePN team just created a generic template that you can use on your domain it does not mean your going to make any money with it.

    A website is just a tool a small piece of software which leads to the conversion, you still need to drive the traffic, you still need to target the traffic, you still need to build some geo-targeting features into the site, and you still need to monitor your reports to better optimize your campaigns.

    Not to mention using a generic site template is about the worst thing you could possibly do as an affiliate marketer.

    Ashley, there is already tools out there that do this, one of the more popular ones is phpBay ( http://www.phpbay.com/ ).

    Now I don’t mean to step on any toes or to say those idea’s won’t work I just personally believe that as an affiliate our jobs should include building the site, adding the geo-targeting, driving the traffic, optimizing the traffic, examining our reports, creating some custom tools, ect…

    While the guys working on the ePN team should be making sure the system stay’s up to date, educate us about how to use the reports in interesting ways, give out suggestions on the blog about how to optimize your campaigns (just as they do now), make sure they kick the API developers from time to time to say hey here are some new feature suggestions, making sure the affiliates are following good practices, removing affiliates which partake in illegal acts of marketing, ect…

    I believe it becomes detrimental to an affiliate program when the rolls of the affiliate and the rolls of the network start to become merged together.

    Leave the ePN work to the ePN team and they can leave the affiliate work to us affiliates, I mean at the end of the day that is what it’s all about anyway, the guys at the network do what they do best (build and manage a network) and the affiliates do what they do best, build websites, promote products and drive quality traffic.

    It’s a solid B2B relationship that does work really well and will continue to work well just as long as both sides of the fence know what they are supposed to be doing and one side does not try and spend all there resources trying to fulfill the job that the otherside should be taking care of.

  • http://www.williamwaiwong.com Will

    Congrats Chad! I’m looking forward to seeing how I can leverage all the new functionality and features coming with EPN in the coming months.

  • http://www.woodylabs.com Woody

    Welcome Chad! I look forward to seeing some improved capacities to analyse how well we are converting etc, perhaps something on the transaction logs so as we can see per transaction the quality you assign it? or at least more help material on looking at these logs in the epc era of ebay affiliation.

    I have been with ebay affiliates since Commision Junction and its certainly improved, though its been a bit of work switching over at points when you moved from cj etc hopefully now we will see a period of mutually benificial stable, improving business :D

  • Kev

    Welcome Chad. What the majority of affiliates seek from you as head of EPN is transparency and respect. Transparancy about exactly how the QCP algorithm works so that we might better understand what we are paid for. It is much more difficult to send motivaed buyer (quality?) traffic to an auction site than it is to an ecoimmerce site because auction sales are shades of grey rather than the black and white of ecommerce sales. And what do I mean about respect? I guess it’s having the good grace to TELL someone they maybe doing something wrong and giving them the right of reply BEFORE any further action is taken. Just my 2 cents worth :)

  • http://eBayPartnerNetwork Chad

    Hi all,

    Thanks for the feedback. There have been some great constructive comments.

    Kev – on the question of transparency around QCP, I’ll start by being honest and say that we will not be sharing any more specific details about the algorithm than we have already disclosed on the blog. The reasons for this relate to security, and more importantly, we are concerned that by focusing on the details of the formula, publishers are going to begin optimizing for those specific factors, rather than what’s best for the shopper. What we want to encourage is that our partners focus on bringing buyers to eBay that are going to transact in normal, healthy ways. Since we launched QCP, we have been posting regular guidance on the blog on how to optimize your traffic and we will continue to do so. Look for an article in the next few weeks addressing some of the more recent questions we’re seeing on the board more recently.

    With regard to your comments about communicating before any action is taken, I know that our Network Quality team works extremely hard to keep fraud out of the network, which means that we can afford to pay good publishers more. For those who intentionally violate our terms and conditions, I don’t believe the burden can be put on the ePN team to give advanced notice prior to taking action. However, in cases where our team has questions about campaigns, they try to contact and work with publishers prior to taking any action, though I definitely agree with you that we need to improve our communication flows.

    Chad

  • Adam

    Hi Chad,

    I agree 100% that the communication channels need to be there, I’ve been a part of a ton of affiliate networks in the past and the number one thing I absolutely hated was being dropped from a campaign without any prior warnings.

    The main reason why I personally have been dropped from promoting an offer in the past was because the leads I was sending to the merchant were not converting into paying customers at a high enough rate.

    So instead of telling me this so I could improve my traffic quality they instead just told the network to drop me from the campaign.

    I know that ePN works differently in many aspects but if I’m sending for instance leads to a company and my statistics are showing me that my traffic is converting into a lead I’m in the dark about the quality of those leads afterwords and instead of communicating most merchants will just drop the publisher instead of saying hey can you improve upon this.

    With ePN it’s different because we are not being paid for lead generation but instead by actual sales of the items on eBay, which makes it much easier on our ends to determine the quality of our traffic.

    However I do agree that publishers who are blatantly violating the ePN terms of service should be removed swiftly to ensure that the publishers who are actually working hard to build a solid business relationship with ePN get to stay competitive.

    I also want to point out that sometimes even someone (like me) who is in the business for the long term and is looking for a solid legal business relationship do make mistakes from time to time and when a campaign is in question it is imperative that the ePN team contact that publisher via a phone call or better yet a simple email saying that there methods of promotion are in question and the team should ask the publisher to rectify the issue in a timely manner.

    A timely manner for me is 48 – 72 hours, preferably 72 hours since it may take you a half a day to realize you got an email that something is wrong. However if I was ever to be contacted about a potential issue my number one priority over everything else would be to fix that issue as quickly as possible in order to stay in good standing with the network.

    I would hope that the other publishers on the network would feel the same way, I’ve always looked at this type of business as an absolute win win situation if both parties take the time to work together and to keep things upstanding and legal.

    Unfortunately though there will always be publishers who do not care about the brand they are promoting and when that happens and they start to use shady and/or illegal marketing tactics it not only brings down the brand but it also hurts all the other publishers in the network because consumers are much more afraid to trust the system.

  • http://www.theaccidentclaim.com Accident Claims

    Chad, Congratulations on your appointment, We wish you all the best with your new role. It sounds like your wealth of experience and vision will bring us very exciting new opportunities for 2010 and beyond!

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