eBay PartnerNetwork Blog

It’s almost upon us — the most wonderful time of year. As we’re unpacking holiday decorations, unraveling lights, rolling out the cookie dough or planning vacations, it’s hard to forget – only 22 shopping days left! The good news for eBay affiliates?  Savings and promotions rank highest among consumers’ priorities this year, according to the National Retail Federation. Also, a recent survey sponsored by ATG and conducted by the e-tailing group claims that in 2008 49 percent of holiday gift spending among US Internet users will occur online, compared with 44 percent in stores.
What better place than eBay to find bargains on the perfect gifts for wives, husbands, friends, parents, kids and more? So grab a hot cocoa and your coziest slippers and start directing your online traffic over to eBay to shop.  Following are a few things savvy shoppers will be scouting for this holiday season.
He’s making his list, he’s checking it twice … for the little ones on the “nice” list, consider posting the top 10 below:

1. Playskool Kota the Triceratops
2. High School Musical Dance Mat
3. Bratz Girls Really Rock set
4. Bakugan Battle Arena
5. Wild Planet Animal Scramble
6. Ultimate Wall-E
7. U-dance Game, Hasbro
8. Wonder Pets – This is Serious Ming Ming
9. Crayola Glow Station
10. Fur Real Friends Biscuit My Lovin Pup

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Hello,

We wanted to notify US Publishers of some important tax information.  You will receive a 1099 tax form from eBay Partner Network if:

• you are a United States citizen or legal resident and
• you had $600 reportable tax activity for the year 2008.

eBay Partner Network Forms 1099-MISC will be postmarked via US Postal Service no later than January 31, 2009.  To ensure the accuracy of the 1099 –MISC Forms, please log-in to your eBay Partner Network account and make sure that you have entered the latest information for your account:
- name
- Tax ID
- most recent address

You can find additional information about the 1099-MISC Form from the IRS website, www.irs.gov.
Please note that eBay Partner Network is not authorized to give you any tax advice. Please reach out to a tax advisor to get qualified advice about your taxes.

Warm wishes,
The eBay Partner Network Team

A few of us at eBay Partner Network attended the 2008 PubCon Conference Nov 11-14 in Las Vegas.

If you haven’t attended one of their past conferences, PubCon sessions are designed to give tips to publishers on how to improve and drive traffic to their websites.  We found this year’s PubCon to be especially interesting, with multiple sessions on content generation and management, driving traffic to your websites, and effective affiliate strategies.

We’re going to do a series of blog posts in the next couple of weeks with some of our biggest learnings that we thought might be helpful to you our affiliates.

In several sessions with titles like “SEO on a Shoestring Budget” and “Link Strategies”, we walked away with some interesting tips on interesting ways drive traffic to your sites that went beyond your typical formatting your website to get picked up by search engines.  Check these out:

• Find out who’s linking to your competitors.  Use a tool like like Yahoo’s Site Explorer to see where other sites are getting their traffic.  See if you can also get links from those sites.
• Take advantage of broken links to related sites.  Ask the original website to re-direct the link to you, or contact the destination site and ask them if they’ll re-direct to your pages. (more…)

We would like to remind all of our affiliates that you should always take proactive security measures in order to protect your eBay Partner Network account information, as you would with any other online accounts such as your bank account.  It is important to know that security risks can occur and what steps you can take to protect yourself.  The following are good practices to help prevent security issues with your account:

• Always verify that the URL in your browser displays www.ebaypartnernetwork.com in the domain, prior to entering your User ID and Password.
• Only log into eBay Partner Network by typing the address into your address bar. Do not follow hyperlinks or search engine results to our webpage. If there is a hyperlink in any communications that claim to be from eBay Partner Network, cut and paste it into the Address bar instead of clicking on it.
• Do not share you User ID and Password with anyone.
• Create a strong Password that is not easy to guess.  Be sure to use different passwords for eBay Partner Network than you do for your email, bank accounts, or computer login. This is important to ensure security for all of your accounts.
• We will never send you an email that asks for your personal information or login.  Be aware of phishing emails and spoof sites. Do not put your account password into any forms other than the sign in on the ebaypartnernetwork.com page.

If at any point you feel your account may have been compromised, or see that your personal information or payment details have changed without your knowledge, please contact customer service right away.

Sincerely,

The eBay Partner Network Team

Copyblogger.com editor Brian Clark provided a three-article series earlier this year that offers helpful insight into how online publishers can overcome issues associated with traditional advertising methods and make money with affiliate programs:

Why Affiliate Marketing Will Save Free Online Content

Three Killer Content Strategies for Building Affiliate Marketing Assets

Five Effective Copywriting Tactics for Affiliate Marketing

Clark notes that traditional advertising tactics don’t translate well to the Web, what with limited control over where the reader accesses content (RSS, email, etc.), and the ease with which Web surfers can dismiss, block and simply ignore ads around the edges of a page.  His advice? Since the Internet is a buyer’s market, become the buyer’s trusted advisor. He believes (as do we) that it’s possible to recommend quality offers without alienating the visitors you’ve worked hard to attract. (more…)

This year’s DevCon took place in Chicago, where we announced the launch of the new Merchandising API and the Research API and the UK affiliate team talked about monetizing applications.

APIs

The merchandising API gives you access to popular and great value products on eBay.  Available calls include getDeals, which you can use to find items below the average selling prices, and also getTopSellingProducts and getMostWatchedItems.  Find out more. 
  (more…)