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eBay Drops Commission Junction

posted on March 18, 2008


I don’t know if this had anything to do with Shoemoney’s cajoling but eBay is going solo and bringing their affiliate program in-house. They’re calling it the eBay Partner Network and launched a new blog about it.

As of April 1, 2008 the program will be dropped from the largest affiliate network – Commission Junction. They handle the reporting and pay affiliates in behalf of customers like Yahoo!, Home Depot, and Buy.com. Commission Junction is owned by ValueClick (which recently had some bad news of its own).

eBay started their affiliate program in 2001 and it has more than 100,000 affiliates globally. For those unfamiliar, an affiliate marketer is a person or business who promotes eBay’s products on their web site, blog, or forum and makes money each time they refer a sale.

Affiliate networks make it easier for affiliates – one place to manage and get paid for all of your sales. It’s also one place to go to get the code to place affiliate links on your site. Those links identify you as the person who referred the sale. Existing affiliates must move to the eBay Partner Network by May 1st. Not much time to change all those links.

I asked a newer affiliate, Ariel Adams for his perspective. Adams blogs about luxury watches and makes money referring people to auctions that sell watches on eBay. He talked about problems with reporting and how he can’t tell which watch sells. Mostly though it’s a huge problem to change all the links (and too bad there’s not a tool to help this process, because so far eBay hasn’t offered a lot of details on how the quick change is going to happen).

“This creates a huge inconvenience for people like me because we rely on lots of existing links, which now all need to be changed. For me we are talking 100s of links, and so far I don’t see anything that can make the switch particularly easy.”

For long-time affiliates this is an even more daunting task. However, if the reporting and flexibility improves, it could improve things long term. For now, there aren’t a lot of specific details from eBay about how the new program will work.


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  • http://www.askowlbert.com Barbara Ling (aka Owlbert)

    Morning,

    The amount of work that will be required to change all of my sites’ links is staggering, so I’m choosing to look at it as an opportunity to update my 100s of sites.

    I’d probably panic if I viewed it another way. :)

    Barbara

  • http://www.whatimnot.com Piper

    I agree, it definitely won’t be fun updating everything – but hopefully, in the end, they’ll make some changes that benefit the affiliates, too. More detailed tracking would definitely be nice.

  • http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com Search Engine Optimization Journal

    Surprised they even went with a third party platform to begin with! They should definitely offer some additional benefits for existing affiliates due to the big hassle this change brings!

  • http://www.vacationsonaship.com/ Mike

    Technically they are dropping CJ on May 1st. They are having a 1 month period starting April 1st where you can use either but you get a 5% bonus for commissions in April if you switch early.

    Also, there is a way to use the CJ commission report to figure out what sold on ebay. Here is one place that describes how to do it:
    http://www.davidpitlyuk.com/2008/01/25/find-out-what-people-bought-fro m-your-commission-junction-ebay-affiliate-program/

  • ivor

    WTF, we get screwed in South Africa all the time! I give up!

  • http://www.gadgets4nowt.co.uk PS3

    eBay are certainly going through a lot of changes at the moment. Fair play to them, you can’t just stand still and let things happen around you any more.

    Only time will time if they are the right moves of course though, particularly the imminent feedback changes.

  • http://www.youtube.com/booktrailers sathish

    What an interesting way to get people interested in reading! Book trailers are like movie trailers, but for books! You can find them all over the internet now, but here is a site that’s featuring them on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/booktrailers

  • http://www.ablogtoread.com Ariel Adams

    Janet,
    Thank you for the mention. aBlogtoRead.com would not be what it is today without you.
    Mike is correct that there is a method to discover what items are being sold through one’s site on eBay using CJ, but it is a hidden, bulky, many step, and time consuming approach. For most affiliates like myself, it does not make too much sense to use it, especially when the time required to understand what people are buying based upon what they are clicking on is extreme.
    eBay would be wise to install a system allowing for easy understanding of an affiliates performance, for the purposes of self optimization. I want to know what people bought, what links they clicked to buy it, and how long after they clicked a link did they get it. This latter concern is an important issue as eBay is divided into auctions and immediate purchase transactions.
    Further, a month of 5% bonuses is hardly enough to push publishers with thousands of links to spend countless hours working to migrate. Oh well, I still love my eBay :)

    http://www.ablogtoread.com

  • http://prosperitywriter.com/ Prosperity Writer

    i can only imagine the hassle of back to 100s of sites to change your affiliate links.

    i hope ebay’s in-house affiliate program will offer more tools and more value to their affiliates.

  • Pingback: Switching From Commission Junction to eBay for my BANS sites.

  • http://www.imtemplates.com Minisite templates

    This is a massive hassle for me to go and update all my sites – but hopefully it will be worth it. I feel sorry for all those that have created software which autocreates sites and things like that using the Comission Junction aff program – I hope it’s not too much work for them changing their systems

    James

  • http://www.inkmyprinter.com Printer Ink Guru

    The first month of the changeover to ebay’s in house affiliate program, ebay partner network, was a total disaster for many ebay affiliate marketers like myself. They extended the deadline as noted above and tracking and commissions are finally what they were before the move from commission junction.

  • http://www.barbaraling.com Barbara Ling

    I’m still knee-deep in getting all my sites updated. I’m lucky that I know shell-scripting; it’s amazing that the technology that was cuttingEdge 18 years ago can still work beautifully today.

    But wow, the pain, the pain! Dr. Smith from Lost in Space would appreciate it. :)

    Barbara

    Barbara Ling’s last blog post..RANT – What the eBay Affiliate Program is Missing Part 2 – Parallel Universe Shipping!

  • http://marketingonlineinternet.com Junior

    Hi this i news for all, it might now be easier for many people to get accepted now.

    Junior’s last blog post..Why You Should Publish an eZine?

  • Pingback: Creating Multiple Streams of Affiliate Marketing Income. | Marketing Online Internet

  • http://softwarewiki.org/blog/ Jeff

    The new EPN is working out much better for me.

    Seems like alot of people got complaints, while I don’t doubt that some people are having problems, it’s definately not across the board.

    Jeff’s last blog post..green

  • abcyesn

    It’s good for ebay that they now have their own affiliate marketing, but cj isn’t doing so bad for itself, if you have questions how to start cj, go to http://www.CommissionJunctionForum.com

  • Pingback: It's time for a review. - Website Babble Webmaster Forums

  • Pingback: ECommNewz » Blog Archive » EBay Partner Network Is Going Solo

  • John

    Can I possibly be the only eBay affiliate on earth who was NOT notified of this change? I didn’t find out about it until September 18.

    So for three and a half months I continued to drive clicks to eBay which no doubt resulted in sales which I did not get compensated for.

    Did this happen to anyone else?

    I’ve lost $500 in potential commissions.

  • http://topsurveysites.org Paid Survey Guy

    I was actually really happy when this happened, I got banned by CJ last year and I didn’t do anything wrong and I never got my $500 in commission due. eBays partner network is pretty good, and I also see they are now affiliated with the Pepperjam network. It will be interesting to see if my profit rises as a consequence…

    Paid Survey Guy’s last blog post..Take Surveys And Get Paid

  • http://ministryofinternet.com Anthony.P

    They are saving all the commission juice for themselves instead of CJ so I would say this is a correct move.

  • http://itsoke.com brandon alan scofield

    I aloso got banned by CJ,now I join amazon

    brandon alan scofield’s last blog post..First post

  • http://www.macbook4u.co.uk Apple Macbook

    Was a shame to see CJ go.

    Caused a lot of downturn in money made by affiliate marketers.

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