As many of you know, for the last 10 years I have been participating in Affiliate Marketing in my spare time. It has been very lucrative at times, other times it just helps pay the bills. I recently joined the Ebay EPN affiliate program. EPN stands for Ebay Partner Network, which is ironic because they are not treating their affiliates like partners.
After joining the EPN I began using a program called BANS, (Build A Niche Store) Which allows you to integrate the EPN links and auction listings into a site. It saves you time by allowing you to select a niche, it builds the categories and all navigation for the site. You then go in and add custom content and other ads to monetize the site.
After one month of building a BANS section to SpeedShoppers.com and ClassicJunkYard.com theEPN was making a profit. I was averaging $20.00 EPC (earning per 100 clicks) and had made a whopping $80. This almost paid for my purchase of the BANS software.
Then came August 7th… I could not log into my account, the system said my password or user name was invalid. I contacted technical support and found out that my account was "EXPIRED" due to poor quality traffic. I then appealed, and a week later was reinstated with an apology from customer service. Many others in the EPN community had a similar experience and were reinstated. No public explanation from Ebay on their forum, or blog, just reinstatement for those who bothered to contact customer support.
Fast forward to August 20th, many long time affiliates are being thrown out of the EPN due to visitors who are not engaged once they click over to Ebay… this is another way of stating poor traffic quality. Now I have been around for 10 years, and have never seen an affiliate program toss out affiliates in such a manner. I have been told that traffic is of low quality and have been asked to try to improve it, or risk having a reduced pay-out imposed. To date I have not been thrown out but I am just waiting. I will not be developing any more sites or optimizing pages for the EPN.
To read Ebays response to the issue click here.
So the moral of this story… Ebay has committed affiliate suicide and has cut the hand that feeds them. Hundreds of angry affiliates are already blogging about this and getting the word out to stay away from the EPN. As affiliates we try to build residual streams of income from the sites we build. With minimal upkeep most sites produce trickles of income for years to come. How can anyone invest time in a system that simply cuts off their affiliates with no chance to improve quality?
To read some of the stories from affiliates that have invested many many hours building sites around the EPN click here.
Click Here to read one of the best sites I have found that describes the issues many of us have faced… Bravo to the author of this page… I wish I would have had the time to put into this issue.
UPDATE 4-12-2010: I have not been thrown out of the program, and remain an active affiliate. Ebay has gone to a CPC model, with very little visibility of the click traffic. This means they can play games and get away with it. Not accusing them of doing anything wrong, but their original model was very transparent and I believe fair to all involved. I have not seen a drop in earnings after switching to the new system, but have had issues with invalid clicks from bots, over inflating my clicks and causing an issue where Ebay had to investigate. This was resolved quickly and I have not had any issues lately.
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