10. When eBay’s affiliate program changed from a straight up affiliate program to a PPC program it became not about helping all of their affiliates make more money but eBay more money.
9. Since making the change to a PPC based model the amount of traffic to eBay has dropped to less than Amazon’s for the first time since eBay passed Amazon. This is not good news for eBay as it happened the month before Christmas. Could this just be a coincidence that 10 million less unique visitors visited eBay in the same month as the PPC structure was implemented? Probably not. Its all those beginner to novice affiliate marketers taking their web traffic and referring it somewhere else.
8. The goal is to reward good affiliate marketers with higher PPC earnings but how can the affiliate marketer know what you think is good traffic and whats not? Isn’t a sale good enough? How many companies pay their employees for bringing customers into the door and not making a sale? The answer is zero. I could only imagine a boss saying “Hey good job on bringing in 1000 customers today and NOT making a sale. We are going to give you a raise.”
7. Nothing makes a affiliate marketer more angry then looking into the transactions that occured and seeing something that they would have earned $25 with on the old way and now earning $0. How could it be bad traffic if the end result is a sale?
6. People go where the money is at. When the money they use to be earning through the affiliate program is not as good then why stay?
5. Does eBay think they are the only good affiliate program around because there are hundreds of thousands of products available? Maybe. What it means now is that affiliate marketers are going to have to team up with specific companies to make sales and not just a online shopping mall. With hundreds available it should not be hard to do.
4. Who really wins here? Does eBay make more money? I don’t see how. They are getting less people sent to their site to buy stuff. Less transactions means less revenues from listing fees. How can less be more when you only paid out when a sale was made to an affiliate.
3. The eBay affiliate program is now a joke. They have now turned away the very people who loved their website and made it into what it is. It went from making people into entrepreneurs to now making people into a employee. Affiliate marketers don’t work for eBay. You don’t give them a 401k, health benefits, or pay them a salary. You only reward them on a sale. If anything, you should want more affiliate marketers and less salaried employees.
2. Does eBay know that it does not produce anything? All you are eBay is a forum for listing products. It is already becoming too expensive to list products on your site as your fees are high. With this in mind, many people are choosing to build their own websites to sell their products on. What about all of those garage sellers from back in the day? Many choose to list it on Craigslist first as its FREE and easy to do. How much longer does eBay think they can get by on brand recognition alone? Ask companies like GM how its working for them and they actually produce something. I wonder how much lower the eBay stock price will go with these revenue deterring practices.
1. Transperency. eBay has made the affiliate program into a guessing game. Before it was pretty simple. Send traffic to eBay and if that person buys something you get a % of the revenue. How do we know whats good traffic or not? What does it matter? Hopefully eBay will stop acting like the U.S Government by hiding secrets from the people that make it what it is.
