Chatting with eBay Partner Network – Episode 3

July 28th, 2010 | eBay Partner Network Team

Hi All,

This is the second of two episodes where Chad speaks with Will Martin-Gill, former head of the eBay Partner Network. In this episode, Will and Chad dive deeper into the reasons behind Quality Click Pricing.

Chatting with EPN: Episode 3 from eBay Partner Network TV on Vimeo.

The eBay Partner Network Team

  • http://www.redflymarketing.com/ Dave Davis

    “The goal is bring good happy engaged buyers to our website that do good things on our website” – Yes, you do need to give more detail.

    We know we’re not going to get the formula but isn’t the formula designed to reward certain activities? Why not give us SOMETHING that we can optimize for? Anything? At least then we can send the traffic that you don’t want somewhere else.

    Like Google’s quality score, they don’t give us the formula but they do give us SOMETHING. They tell us what we SHOULD be focusing on. You guys don’t. You guys just keep telling us that you’re not going to give us anything which isn’t really helpful. I’m sure there’s a lot of parts to the algorithm and I have no doubt that there are parts that can be manipulated, but why not give us some details on the parts that cannot be manipulated? Apart from the ones we already know about (GMB, WBR).

    We know why you moved to QCP, what we WANT to know is how we can improve our payouts. Improving our payouts is a win-win. You seem to be completely missing that.

    Anyway, really enjoying the videos. Keep them coming.

  • http://www.auctionsieve.com Neville Ridley-Smith

    Good stuff guys. Getting more polished with each video.
    And I think the answer about the EPC algorithm was spot on. Looking forward to hearing the extra details you mentioned.
    Also, where’s the stat of the day?

  • http://www.videogamepricecharts.com VGPC

    I can completely understand the change to quality click pricing and I think it has been a net positive for our site. The videos keep on saying that you don’t want to share the algorithm because you “don’t want people to optimize for an algorithm” but the problem with having the algorithm secret is two fold:

    1. When revenue increases or decreases month to month a site has a hard time knowing why. Traffic to ebay was the exact same, but we earned 20% less – Why did that happen? It is hard for affiliates to answer that question.

    2. Affiliates don’t know the overall payout % ebay is giving the entire affiliate network so by tweaking the algorithm you can lower the payout to all affiliates and we don’t know it. I hope ebay isn’t doing this, but you could very easily “hide” decreases in payout with this new setup.

    We have a harder time making decisions with this affiliate setup and the pessimist in me feels ebay can lower payouts easily without notifying the network.

  • http://www.oopwee.com Paul

    I agree with Dave & VGPC but they do say in the video they are going to try and make it a little more transparent. I think it will come in time just like google. Google have only just given us some good tools and I think with the epn, time will be our virtue.

    I am getting excited about what is coming.

    Like these video’s hope you keep the info flowing.

  • http://www.auctionalfie.com Alfie

    It’s an interesting model and I do understand why it was introduced.

    However, reintroducing the old commission based report into the graphs would also be helpful as then it would be possible to cross reference any high quality sales to our own on server logs to really focus on our driving more of that jiucy traffic to you.

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