eBay PartnerNetwork Blog

Hello All,

We are in the process of upgrading our reporting systems after the reporting delays this past weekend and wanted to tell you ahead of time that there will be some additional delays the rest of this week in reporting as we perform this maintenance. 

The data from the 14th posted today, but the transactions from the 15th will be delayed until tomorrow, the 17th.  We expect tomorrow’s update will also include data from the 16th, and be back to the normal schedule moving forward.

We apologize for the inconvenience and want to confirm that the underlying tracking system is still in place and working properly, this issue is only affecting the loading of that data into the graphs and tables available for publishers on eBay Partner Network.

Sincerely,

eBay Parnter Network Team

The eBay France affiliate team is very happy to inform you that as of the 1st of November 2008, the payment structure of the French affiliate program will change in order to help you earn more!

Up to now, the eBay.fr affiliate program has mostly rewarded the recruitment of new registered users. As of the 1st of November, we want to compensate you more for the activity of the 12 million registered users we have already!

This is why, on top of the new ACRU compensation, the ebay.fr affiliate program will be tying your earnings per bid and BIN to the revenue we get for the sold item and the share you receive will vary from 40% to 65%. This model has already allowed affiliates to increase their income in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. (more…)

Hello and Welcome to the Halloween edition of the ePN blog

Fall colors, longer nights and that telltale chill in the air … Halloween is just around the corner. As brick and mortar stores set up their creepy displays, eBay sellers are not to be outdone. Online shoppers can scare up a good deal on hordes of costumes, decorations, movies and more. By posting banner ads or links to Halloween related listings on eBay, affiliates are bound to drive a frightening amount of quality traffic … while driving revenue for themselves. 

A few tips on hot costumes for 2008: With the releases of Iron Man and The Dark Knight, this is sure to be a big year for superheroes. Here are a few fun examples:

Iron Man

Little Batman

Big Batman

and even … Batdog? (more…)

We have identified an issue that affected reporting of eBay Revenue, Earnings, and EPC in the US, UK, AU, and CA programs.  Some of these metrics were double-counted in our system. The issue affected publishers from Sept 5th-Sept 9th.

We have been able to calculate down to the individual publisher level what the correct revenue should be for those days. Our team is in the process of correcting the associated data and summary reports but may take several more days to complete this task.  You may also see line items in your transaction download report to debit the overstated amounts in the next few days.  In the meantime, please keep this information in mind as you run any reports that span the associated time periods.

We apologize for any inconvenience this reporting error has caused and thank you for your support of eBay Partner Network!

The eBay Partner Network Team

We are working hard to continue to improve the eBay Partner Network platform and are excited to announce our newest release, which will go live Sept 10th.  Some of the most consistent feedback we have been getting from you has been in the area of reporting.  You have given us many tips and suggestions about how we could expand the functionality in this section to help you better and more easily track your traffic’s performance on eBay.

In this release, we have focused on improving this area of the platform.  We will be:

• Introducing a new tab, “Run Reports”, that consolidates all your reports into one, easier to use create flow.

• Introducing saved and scheduled reports to let you more quickly get the information you use most.

• Adding new fields to the transaction download report that will help you see what category and country the transaction corresponded to.

• Providing a transaction ID to help track each transaction and all the credits/debits associated with it.  We are also giving you the ability to receive non-paid transactions in the download report. (more…)

Our philosophical approach at eBay Partner Network is to pay generous commissions for quality traffic that drives incremental buying activity on eBay, i.e., purchases that occurred due to the affiliate’s actions.  Thus, we’ve looked closely at how engaged the traffic is from our affiliates and in the interest of eBay’s sellers and the overall health of the program, we made the decision to expire a small number of affiliates who were driving the least engaged traffic.  Moving forward, should we notice that any affiliate is driving low quality traffic according to our metrics, our goal is to provide help in improving the affiliate’s site(s) before taking any action such as expiration.

In the interest of helping you maximize the impact of the traffic you drive to eBay, and enjoying in the financial benefits, we also wanted to re-post some of the tips from our board posts which some folks found to be very helpful. (more…)

As you may have seen already if you’re an eBay buyer or seller as well as an affiliate, we’ve made some changes to the eBay.com, eBay.co.uk and eBay.de sites in September to keep buyers coming back to eBay time and time again. 

The changes vary by country, but in summary, we are making it easier to list fixed items on eBay by reducing the up front costs and shifting the costs to the back end final value fees, which are only paid if you’re successful in selling an item.

Although, the changes are designed to increase the number of products on the site and therefore provide more choice for the buyers that you drive to eBay, we don’t expect this to have any immediate impact on any of your metrics.

Find out more on the changes in the US, in the UK and Germany.

US – 16th September

UK – 25th September

DE - 25th September (in German only)

There is a known bug for Tool Validator, and and it currently reports a base URL error for Editor Kit in our Tool Validator Report, despite it being correct in your links. We are currently working on a fix for this, and it will be implemented on September 10. As always, we appreciate your on-going efforts to verify your links, and appreciate your patience!

Dear Publisher,

We will be making a few enhancements to the Transaction Download Report in our upcoming September 10th release.  If you are using the API to automatically receive and process this report, or are an active user of this report, please be aware of these changes and make the proper adjustments.

Field Changes:
We will be adding three more  fields to the right of the existing columns. These will include the Site ID, Meta Category ID, and Unique Transaction ID.

New Field Details:
The Site ID will identify the site on which the conversion took place (e.g. eBay.com, eBay.co.uk, ebay.fr, etc) (more…)

Hi all,

On Sunday, August 10th we had an issue that affected reporting of eBay Total Sale Amount, Earnings, and EPC in the US, UK, AU, and CA programs. These metrics were double-counted for certain items, so some publishers will see overstated earnings amounts for August 10th. Affected publishers will notice an update in their summary reports on August 18th to reflect the correct amounts, as well as line items in their transaction download report to debit the overstated amounts. These line items will include the eBay Item IDs that correspond to the overstated amounts and will contain August 10th Transaction Dates.

We apologize for any inconvenience this reporting error has caused and thank you for your support of eBay Partner Network!

The eBay Partner Network Team