eBay Drops Commission Junction
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008;
-- Janet Meiners |
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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March 19th, 2008 at 4:24 am
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
March 19th, 2008 at 7:03 am
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.
March 19th, 2008 at 10:33 am
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!
March 19th, 2008 at 10:43 am
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/
March 19th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
WTF, we get screwed in South Africa all the time! I give up!
March 19th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
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.
March 20th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
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
March 21st, 2008 at 9:23 pm
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
March 24th, 2008 at 1:47 am
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.
April 1st, 2008 at 6:31 am
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April 8th, 2008 at 10:51 am
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