eBay PartnerNetwork Blog

Hello All,

We will soon be recording new videos to continue with our “Chatting with eBay Partner Network” videocast series. We received a lot of great feedback from the first four episodes, and we will use your suggestions to improve our videos and give you useful and insightful information. Please use the comments in this blog post to tell us what you would like to see in future videos and we will do our best to incorporate your constructive suggestions in our upcoming series.

Thank you
The eBay Partner Network Team

Here at R.O.EYE we have been listening to publisher feedback and requests for additional assistance and resources. One of the most popular requests has been a downloadable resource for international eBay category IDs and I’ll explain why…

One of the best ways to optimize your custom banner or API integration is to apply category ID filters. This helps to ensure that only the most relevant results are returned.

Pretty straightforward if you are only receiving traffic from one country, however if you are geo-targeting to multiple countries, you will find that the category IDs are not the same in each country. This makes optimizing your custom banner or API integration using category filters more time intensive, especially when you add in the complexities of different languages.

This R.O.EYE blog post has more information on a time saving solution, as well as a sample of what it looks like. Because R.O.EYE created this tool, eBay is unable to offer support for it, however there is a support email address provided by R.O.EYE should you need any assistance.

Finally, make sure that you’re signed up to the relevant eBay Partner Network programs for the territories you want to promote, otherwise you won’t get paid for the traffic you drive to these sites.

Alex Harvey, Technical Solutions Executive at R.O.EYE

We’re looking forward to late summer in New York! We’ll be heading out soon for Affiliate Summit East Aug. 15-17, which looks like it’s going to be a great show. We look forward to spending some time with our affiliates and partners. The Performance Marketing Association has a booth at the show – they’ll be arming people with knowledge about the Affiliate Tax.

If you haven’t gotten your pass for Affiliate Summit yet, the show has sold out. However, there are some passes on eBay! Check here for available passes and information on how to register.

We’ll be checking out a few sessions that have caught our eye, including the success story panel featuring Sears, American Express and Travelocity, and Joe Stepniewski’s (of Skimlinks) session on exciting new applications in affiliate marketing. The sessions about mobile affiliate marketing and the one about how bloggers can connect with audiences also look interesting.

There’s also a lot on the agenda this year about social media – we’re looking forward to hearing about how affiliates are using it to grow their businesses. This month’s FeedFront issue has some good articles on the topic, including this article from Brian Solis, author of Engage! Brian offers some great advice to use as a blueprint for your social media efforts.

Speaking of social media, are any of you already using it for affiliate marketing? If so, how’s it going? Any lessons learned you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

If you’d like to meet up with us at ASE, send us a Tweet at @eBay_Affiliates. We’d love to talk with you about your business, answer any questions you have or just use the opportunity to meet face to face.

Hope to see you in New York!
The eBay Partner Network Team

In this episode Chad introduces JJ McCarthy, the head of eBay Partner Network US. Get to know JJ as he shares what he likes most about his role at eBay, as well as find out his interesting stat of the day!

Chatting with EPN: Episode 4 from eBay Partner Network TV on Vimeo.

Enjoy,
The 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

We’ve heard your feedback about our tools and our reporting and we are pleased to announce that on Monday, July 26th, we will be rolling out a a major Custom Banner upgrade, a new EPC Download Report, and an enhancement to the Transaction Download report:

Custom Banner Enhancements


We have expanded Custom Banner capabilities to better meet your needs. Here are the new features that will be available soon:

• Custom Banner will continue to offer Flash integration but will now provide new HTML templates with the following options:




• Show the badges for Top-Rated Seller, Free Shipping, PayPal, Buy It Now
• The image-and-text format you are used to will be available but we will also introduce a text-only version
• Contextual targeting available for eBay DE, eBay AT, and eBay CH programs.
• Ability to filter for Free Shipping and Top-Rated Seller.
• Multiple keyword and category search: you can now search across several keywords and eBay categories, or select the “Use Popular Search” option.
• Store custom themes: once you’ve chosen the ideal color and font for your Custom Banner you’ll be able to save them and reuse in future banners.
• Improved performance for a quicker display of the Flash version of Custom Banner.

Enhancements to your reports

• A new EPC Download Report: The EPC Download Report allows all publishers who are on Quality Click Pricing to download their daily EPC at a campaign level for each program. This report will only include information for campaigns that had click activity for the date(s) selected.
• Transaction Download Report: The format of the transaction download report will not change, but we will modify how we populate two columns. For eBay programs, the “eBay Quantity Sold”, and “eBay Total Sale Amount” columns will be blank when an adjustment is being reported to a transaction. These columns will not be impacted when the transaction is included in the transaction download report for the first time.

We continue to listen to your suggestions and enhance eBay Partner Network, the tools at your disposal, and the reports so as to give you the best possible conditions to promote eBay. Please continue to give us your opinion.

The eBay Partner Network Team

Hi All,

In this videocast Chad talks with his predecessor, Will Martin-Gill, about topics such as what it’s like to work within eBay Partner Network, his advice for our partners and also parting advice for Chad in his new role.

Thank you for your commitment to eBay Partner Network and best wishes in your new position, Will!

The eBay Partner Network Team

Hi All,

We’ve decided to try a new form of communication with you, our affiliate partners – video. This is the first in a series of videocasts we’ll be releasing over the next few weeks, to give you a chance to get to know the team here at eBay Partner Network. We’ll be discussing what’s happening here at eBay, what it’s like to work for ePN, industry trends and other things that pop up along the way. We’ll also be giving you a chance to help us shape future content. We’d love to hear your thoughts along the way (constructive, please!) so that we can improve on this as we go. And, of course, we hope you enjoy them as much as we’ve been enjoying working on them.

By the way, the case study I reference in this video can be downloaded here: http://bit.ly/cgVami

Thanks and enjoy!
Chad

Hi All,

We’re proud to announce that eBay has won the Innovative Merchant Award at the A4U Affiliate Marketing Awards, held in London last night. http://www.a4uawards.com/

The award was judged by a panel of UK industry experts and here’s what they had to say about Quality Click Pricing: “Judges were impressed by eBay’s smart implementation and commended their bravery in offering a sophisticated and clever algorithm which encouraged affiliates to work in a way that better served the advertiser’s business objectives.”

The event itself was very glamorous, starting with a champagne reception, followed by dinner and a comedy set from Kevin Bridges, the up and coming Scottish comedian. It was also fantastic to see so many of our affiliates at the event and we were happy to see some of them win awards themselves.

Thanks to the judges and especially to all our publishers for making Quality Click Pricing a success! Finally congratulations to all the other winners – all thoroughly deserved!

The European Affiliate team

Hi all,

We have noticed recently that the use of temporary redirects (302 redirects) instead of 301 redirects can result in activity that is not compliant with our terms & conditions. We know that often this is unintentional, so we have worked together with a few of our affiliates to identify and prevent the problem. Here is an example to illustrate what can happen:

Many of our affiliates use a redirection page to help collect statistics on their click through to eBay. In these cases, when a user clicks on a link on the affiliate site, they are taken to a URL (redirection page) that logs the click through and then redirects them to an eBay page by using a 302 HTTP return code. The search engine crawler indexes the content it finds at the end of the temporary redirect (the eBay page) to the redirection URL. Therefore, when a user searches for content from the eBay page, the search engine results will contain matches to the redirection URL that link directly to eBay. This type of redirection is not compliant with our terms and conditions. A solution to this problem is to use permanent redirects, i.e. 301 return codes instead of 302. This will ensure that all the content on the destination page after the redirect is indexed to that page only.

If you are currently using a 302 redirect in a method similar to the one described above, please inform us by emailing CS and make the appropriate changes immediately. From June 8th 2010, we will treat this issue as an intentional breach of our terms and conditions and any affiliate exhibiting this behavior will be expired.

The eBay Partner Network team