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

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

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

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

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

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

The European eBay Partner Network team will soon be attending A4U Europe in Munich, Germany, on 18th and 19th of May. Though we won’t be stationed at a booth this year, the whole team are  eager to meet you and you’ll be able to catch up with us either around the conference hall, after speaking sessions or during the evening events.

Bright and early on the morning of 19th May, Chris Howard and JJ Mccarthy, who head up our European and US affiliate teams respectively, will be talking about how we’ve improved the quality of our programme’s traffic both through the introduction of Quality Click Pricing  and the efforts of our Account Management and Network Quality teams.

Finally, we’ll be writing a few posts from the expo, so those of you that aren’t there can still get an idea of what is going on.

Hope to see you in Munich!

Chris, Julia, Paolo, Peter and Mieke, the European eBay Partner Network team.

The main point raised was that many of you use multiple API calls to retrieve listing data, but currently there is only a tool id for each individual call and therefore many of you use the Link Generator tool id instead to get round this issue. Therefore, we have added a new tool id for those of you that are using multiple API calls, which is 10034. If you are using multiple API calls in your campaigns, you can now insert this tool id into your EPN links, as you can see in the example below.

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/707-53477-19255-0/1?campid=12345678&customid=87654321&toolid=10034&mpre=encrypted destination URL

Thanks again for your initial feedback.

Julia
The eBay Partner Network Team

eBay Fashion’s new functionality allows consumers to shop in excess of 19 million average daily listings, making it so simple to find both auction items and fixed price items based on style, brand and popular trends. The enhanced experience includes:

• Enhanced Navigation: There’s a new Fashion tab on the top of the page. Shopping for all things fashion-related will be just one-click away no matter where you are on eBay. In addition, buyers shopping within Fashion will see consistent navigation to all of the top categories, like Women’s Clothing and Men’s Shoes.
• Improved Fashion homepage: The fashion homepage, fashion.ebay.com, has undergone a makeover, including a new design and features. Highlights include a richer, visual experience featuring stylish products, hot fashion trends, themes, most-wanted items, tips from industry stylists and more. Plus, buyers are introduced to new browse experiences for easier access to top brands and products.
• Category and product boutiques: Popular categories like, Women’s Clothing, Men’s Clothing, Women’s Shoes, Men’s Shoes and Handbags now have their own exclusive tailored shopping boutiques — making it easier for buyers to shop by brand, style, size and other attributes and refine their product selection quickly and easily. Boutiques for top brands and themes are also coming soon.
• Gallery View as the default: Buyers have told eBay that they browse merchandise and make their purchasing decisions by looking at pictures. To help them quickly assess how items look, eBay is adding default search results for Fashion queries to gallery view.
• “More like this.”: Ever found an item that was close but not quite what you were looking for? eBay now offers some buyers a new “More like this” experience, where they’ll see an array of visually similar items. This technology allows consumers to find like items based on visual image recognition and key aspects such as brand, style and color.
• Branded merchandise: Fashion buyers want popular labels, so eBay is increasing the breadth and depth of branded inventory with merchandise direct from top brands and retailers. Be on the lookout for some of your favorite brands later this year within Fashion Vault and a new Fashion Outlet.

We want buyers to shop eBay Fashion with confidence, which is why we are proud to offer the eBay Buyer Protection program. eBay Buyer Protection provides customers with access to dedicated support specialists seven days a week, as well as a money-back offer for most purchases should a problem arise and the seller is unable to resolve the issue.

How to Promote eBay Fashion
You can start promoting eBay Fashion today in several ways:

• Use the Creatives Generator Tool and run a search for “Clothing, Shoes & Accessories” under the “Category” drop down from the left hand navigation menu. This search returns featured banners for eBay Fashion and eBay’s Fashion Vault.
• Use the Link Generator Tool with the Custom URL or Item ID options to link directly to sale items.
• Dynamic Banners in sizes 160×600, 300×250 and 728×90 feature current sales at eBay’s Fashion Vault.
• You can access the Fashion Vault XML Feed.

For more information, visit fashion.ebay.com. And, to join the conversation follow @eBay_Fashion, eBay’s new home for fashion finds, tips and trends on Twitter, at www.twitter.com/ebay_fashion.

Happy Promoting!
The eBay Partner Network Team

E-commerce in Italy

There are approximately 20 million internet users in Italy, about a third of the country’s population. Of this number, 5.6 million have made at least one purchase online (survey netcomm GfK Eurisko, May2008). During 2008, e-commerce in Italy had an estimated value of €6.4 billion (approx $8.2 billion). Although e-commerce in Italy is increasing year on year, the market still lags behind the largest European countries such as the UK, Germany and France, both in terms of online sales and the number of online users.

Unfortunately, Italy did not escape the global financial crisis and as in many other countries, the recession has strongly influenced the purchasing behaviour of users:

• Italians are now more sensitive to price, creating an opportunity for publishers to develop sites which cater to savvy shoppers – such as shopping comparison, loyalty and cashback sites.
• The increased importance of price to Italian consumers also means that they are increasingly looking for items from last season, or scouring second-hand websites to get a better deal.

Payments

The credit card remains the preferred way to pay online, with about 70% of online payments using this method. For large purchases, consumer credit (9% of sales) is increasingly popular, while PayPal (11%) is also growing quickly due to its convenience for consumers and small to medium sized merchants. Cash on delivery (8%) is declining in popularity because of the high tariffs charged by express couriers.

eBay in Italy

Key information about eBay.it

• eBay.it recently celebrated its ninth birthday, having launched on 15th January, 2001.
• In September 2007, eBay reached the milestone of having 5 million registered users.
• In December 2009, eBay was the most popular ecommerce site in Italy, with over 6.6 million visitors and more than 700 million page views (Source: Nielsen Net Ratings, December 2009).
• There are more than 3,000,000 listings on the eBay.it site, spanning more than 6,700 categories.

Recent changes on eBay.it

In recent years, eBay has made a number of enhancements to the eBay.it site in order to improve the service it offers both buyers and sellers. It is important to be aware of these aspects of the eBay.it site before beginning to promote it.

• Wide range of products across multiple listing formats: With more than 3 million listings across a wide variety of categories, eBay.it offers a great range of inventory whatever buyers are looking for. To enhance this selection of items further, in September 2009 eBay launched eBay Anunci, which allows sellers to create Classified ads for the items they want to sell. Along with the Auction and Buy It Now listing formats common across eBay platforms around the world, eBay Anunci offers Italian consumers unparalleled choice and value, however they want to shop.
• Professional sellers: Italian users are very careful about the reputation, trustworthiness and reliability of the sellers from whom they are buying products. In order to meet the expectations of their buyers, eBay have invested significantly in the past few years to bring more professional sellers with higher service standards onto the Italian site.
• PayPal Buyer protection: Today there are over 3 million PayPal accounts in Italy, a figure which is growing rapidly as more and more eBay sellers offer PayPal as a payment method. eBay now offers buyer protection for users on eBay who buy through PayPal. Buyers who pay with PayPal are protected for the full value of their purchase, including shipping costs.

Useful information on becoming a successful publisher for eBay.it

As with any other website, to become a successful publisher for eBay.it you need to understand the consumers you are trying to attract. In order to help with this, below are some interesting snippets of information which may come in useful when deciding which categories and products to promote to Italian users.

• Popular categories: The three most popular categories on eBay.it are: Mobile & Home Phones; Clothing, Shoes and Accessories; and Computing
• Popular search terms: Some of the keywords used most often to search for products on the eBay.it site are: Nokia; jackets; parkas; mobile phone; bags; sweatshirts; shoes; boots; Apple iPhone; PS3 Games
• Seasonality: While online sales in most countries decrease during the summer, in Italy this trend is even more pronounced, particularly in July and August. Although traffic and total number of conversions drop during this period, we have found that conversion rate from click to purchase remains pretty stable. In addition, buying traffic is often cheaper during the summer because the demand for advertising is lower – giving you the possibility of higher margins during this period.

The eBay Partner Network Team