I know many of my readers are heavy Build A Niche Store users and PHPBay users. If you’re currently using Ebay as a source of income, or thinking about using them, here’s a warning for all Ebay affiliates.
I’ve been watching the situation with the Ebay Partner Network unfold for about the last month. It seems to have settled down some, but most ebay affiliates aren’t breathing a sigh of relief yet.
What’s Going On At Ebay Partner Network?
Some of you may have not heard about the latest news concerning the Ebay Partner Network (or EPN as it’s more commonly known) and its affiliates.
What happened was about a month ago Ebay decided to dump some of its EPN affiliates. Then, a few weeks later, it dumped more. From what I can tell, there have been around 300 to 400 affiliates dumped.
The “Official” reason for dumping many of these affiliates without warning was: “we determined that the traffic generated from your account is significantly less engaged with the eBay site as compared to the standards set by our other affiliates.”
Luckily, knock on wood, I haven’t received such a notice.
However, many affiliates who rely on Ebay for their income have received these notices. Some of these affiliates were bringing down $10k to $30k per month!
The real reason behind the Ebay bans?
There are many speculations about the reason for the bans by Ebay. The most popular is that Ebay is running some type of metric on incoming traffic and comparing those metrics across all affiliates sites. Apparently if the traffic you send Ebay does not behave in a certain way, the feel it’s junk traffic generated by black hat methods.
That being said, I know many of the people who had their accounts pulled out from under them who were doing nothing wrong and relying on organic traffic only.
It would seem that this “metric” Ebay is running generates quite a few “false positives” and Ebay just dumps everyone who falls below a certain threshold in order to try and remove black hat sites that are sending junk traffic.
Sounds good on the surface, but I have a problem with that theory. Most black/grey hat guys I know, wouldn’t waste their time sending hoards of traffic to ebay if it didn’t pay off. They’re about making money just like the rest of us. They’re not about wasting a lot of time sending traffic just for the hell of it.
It’s more likely some geeks at Ebay developed this “metric” and refuses to tweak it or to do manual reviews like Google does. This would have prevented a lot of this mess from happening.
What you can do if you’ve been banned by Ebay Partner Network
If you’re one of the unlucky ones who has had you account terminated by the EPN, you’re only other option is to use PepperJam Network.
Is that a final solution? Probably not. Who’s to say that Ebay won’t terminate their agreement with PepperJam like they did with CJ?
Both BANS and PHPBay have the ability to use Ebay listings through the PepperJam network. With the Build A Niche Store program, you can download a “patch” at their site. With PHPBay, there is a field under your WordPress settings for PHPBay where you can input your PepperJam ID number.
On another note, I have heard about ebay affiliates who have emailed Ebay and have had their accounts reinstated. Although this seems as a last ditch hail marry technique because many were still rejected. But hey, if your house note depends on it, it’s better than sitting on your butt doing nothing!
What to do if you haven’t been banned from EPN
If you’re one of the lucky ones who still has an account with EPN, you should be thinking about your next move should Ebay throw you out in the cold.
Remember Enron? Remember how the employees lost everything they had because all their savings were in Enron stock? Enron? Ebay?
This should be a lesson for us all. I’ve been burnt a few times in the past by merchants who either stopped their affiliate programs or went belly up, owing me thousands of dollars.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket! I can’t stress this enough!
If you’re with EPN now, you might want to consider signing up under PepperJam, just in case.
Otherwise, you should be working on diversifying you affiliate marketing efforts. Yeah, I know it’s hard to work on other affiliate programs when you have one or two that are really raking in the money. But if you’re going to survive with affiliate marketing, you’re going to have to learn how to diversify.
I sincerely hope Ebay will come to its senses and stop this nonsense and start appreciating all the hard work that the Ebay affiliates are doing. But it wouldn’t be the first time a large dot com corporation screwed itself and its affiliates to the point they went out of business.
Stay calm but be vigilant and diversify!
17 responses so far ↓
1 Denise // Sep 8, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Wow this really is scary news. I was just checking my stats today and quite frankly I make nothing yet from e-Bay (around $30 a month). I was just thinking I should really start promoting it hard.
Now I don’t know if I want to invest the time.
I really do not want to lose my affiliate status. I was already turned down on Pepper Jam for they e-Bay program. Have no clue as to why.
2 Julia // Sep 20, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket is right. Years back I made sooooo much money on CJ and all of a sudden it was pulled out from me.
As for BANs, yes I have some, but I think the one’s that pump out these sites without any relevant content may be what is pulling down some of the quality sites and having eBay review their BANs EPN relationship - always be diverse
3 Jay // Sep 22, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Unfortunately pepperjam is no safe haven any longer as I’ve been in contact with people that have been kicked out of pepperjam because they were kicked out of epn.
I posed a simple question to epn on how we can control visitors once they leave our site to make them more “engaged” on ebay. I’ve yet to get a response…
4 Daniel // Sep 24, 2008 at 9:42 am
The top-dog at ePN has changed three times in the six-months they’ve been active. That’s not a good sign. The new boss seems to be just as foolish as the old boss…
I will be surprised if the ePN program still exists six-months from now. They should bite the bullet and turn it back over to CJ.
5 AdJingo // Sep 25, 2008 at 3:54 pm
In response to Daniel’s comment, I agree, anytime there are changes, be very wary.
I have been making money with the new EPN, but but but, sales have diminished lately and still trying to determine why.
6 epn // Oct 1, 2008 at 6:22 am
I’m looking for an account of ebaypartnernetwork with eBay US program actived!
I’ll pay 30$!
Contact me at epn@stantonon.cjb.net
7 PaulS // Dec 10, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Yeah I’ve been kicked out twice now. Once I didn’t mind, I was experimenting with a lot of different things with a huge website. This time around it was perfect organic traffic that cost me a fortune. I even made a new series of niche sites to fit in perfectly with each target. They actually accused me of stuffing cookies and shut me down.
The bottom line is the EPN needs to be boycotted and shut down. They are now fully violateing Laws. In my state it was illegal for them to just shut down my account and reverse all commissions. It is clearly outlined that we are required 30 days and the right to challenge the investigation.
Don’t waste your time with the EPN. There are some real performers out there that don’t just shut you down on a whim.
And if you are trying to buy an EPN account in the US market your kind of insulting us all with $30. A small site can make $200 an hour on the US market without black hat anything. And even then how do you purpose getting the payments? Your not a very inteligent marketer if thats your sollution. I mean, embezelment is still embezelment right?
8 Builder // Dec 12, 2008 at 12:54 am
I run a number of sites and have experimented with setting up social bookmarking sites where people would submit their websites to be included in the site.
Turned out that many of the sites submitted were generic, out-of-the box websites. Same theme, no content, no customization and categories galore.
Putting up a 500+ page website with no direction, theme or content is a waste of time. If eBay is banning these sites, there may be good reason.
As stated in many forums, put up relevant content, focus on quality and think of BANs of phpBAY as an enhancement to your website.
I have seen sites getting good PR, good organic traffic and decent sales - all in moderation!
9 Daniel // Dec 12, 2008 at 9:37 am
So, you would offer me $30 for an account that consistently earns me $1500 a month and only costs me $50 a year to maintain. Are you high, or just stupid? Make a starting offer of $50k and we can begin negotiations.
10 janet // Dec 13, 2008 at 2:55 pm
I have been an eBay affliliate for just under a year and after a lot of hard work was just starting to make some decent money. Yesterday I had the dreaded ‘your account is linked to a banned account’ email and $2000 for last month and $700 for this month reversed.
I have never had an account banned, I have complied with their TOS very carefully to avoid being dumped and this is what I get. Just before Xmas too.
No proper explanation that I could fight against and no warning.
11 Don // Dec 13, 2008 at 6:39 pm
janet, if your site was relying on organic SE traffic, just leave the ebay listings there and make the Google Adsense ads highly-prominate. eBay has no way to stop you from showing the listings as a method of getting visitors and your Adsense revenue will skyrocket. You can even ’suggest’ that people do-not click the eBay listings, causing them to click the Google ads instead.
12 Jamm // Dec 13, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Janet …
Banned account?
What constitute a banned account? Excessive ads?
Do they even list the account?
Hearing things like this really makes me wonder
13 janet // Dec 14, 2008 at 10:40 am
Don Thats exactly what I’ve done for those sites that won’t convert to popshops easily. Waiting to see if my adsense income ‘rockets’
14 janet // Dec 15, 2008 at 8:22 am
I think I may have some idea what has happened. Looking through my gmail account (which is full of junk so I missed it) is a welcoming email from eBay in October. I have had my account with them for a year and did not open an account in October. So someone else must have opened an account in my name through my gmail account. It was activated as I also received a ‘banned account’ email last week . The only way this could have happened as far as I can see is if someone has hacked into my gmail account.
15 Daniel // Dec 15, 2008 at 8:57 am
I have been doing business on the Net for many years and I currently manage a private forum for ePN Affiliates, so I have close contact with hundreds of them. In my experience, ePN takes action based on potentially flawed information, then refuses to make corrections.
Many people have purchased Websites from other ePN members who got banned, just to have themselves banned for using a URL associated with a banned account. To my knowledge, none of these affiliate got their accounts reinstated. I talked to an affiliate yesterday who was banned. The ePN email cited “poor quality” as the specific reason. At the time, he was receiving ACRU payments for “High” quality.
If you want to use ePN for extra monthly cash, that’s fine. But I highly discourage anyone from using ePN as a main source of income. The management of ePN is unstable and cannot be trusted.
I also discourage people from using free email accounts for business. Regardless of denials by Yahoo, MSN and Google, they are easy to hack. The recent hack of AK Gov Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account is a good example. Use your ISP email address and keep your email on your computer. If you are concerned with SPAM, use a challenge/response software similar to the one in this article: http://www.onelung.net/choicemail . They are 99.99% effective.
Best of luck in the future.
16 Ace // Jan 4, 2009 at 11:03 am
Any other alternatives to ebay that people have moved on to?
17 Tiara // Feb 9, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Great read, but I am just a little lost. I don’t make bank with ebay so I’m not too distraught, but I want to make sure I keep my account. Is it your recommendation that we do not use PHPbay or BANs? Or that we go a different route [I got lost with that 'PepperJam' talk]?
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