eBay PartnerNetwork Blog

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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) Read the rest of this entry »

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

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. 
  Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Publisher,

It’s the start of term and the time to get back to business. We want to help you to maximize your earnings during this busy time.  The eBay France affiliation program is therefore offering you an exceptional opportunity to increase your payout by up to €12500!

The Concept :

Try to , from September 1st to September 30th included,  ramp up sufficiently the total number of qualifying transactions (based on those generated from July 1st to 31st 2008) , OR reach the  highest threshold and get the corresponding bonus !

Qualifying transactions for the eBay Fr program are new active users and first bid or buy-it-now, (see eBay FR program details). This promotion is applicable to both types of qualifying transactions. Read the rest of this entry »

eBay offers many different tools, widgets, banners and creatives to help affiliates run successful Internet marketing campaigns.  With the new eBay Partner Network platform, we have added even more! 

Advanced Creatives – New! 

One of the biggest things we heard from you was “give us more premium creatives!”  So as part of the launch of eBay Partner Network, we’ve increased the number of rich media or flash ads and all the hot categories are represented.  The new Creatives Generator tool in the “Tools” tab in the eBay Partner Network helps you dynamically filter the creatives by size and program and whether it  is geo-targeted (see below).   We have found rich-media banners like this have averaged up to a forty percent higher click-through rate over static banners. Read the rest of this entry »