Affiliate Programs

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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!