Are you a member of ebay partner netwwork?

I went to Affiliate Summit 2009 in Las Vegas for the sole purpose of meeting the guys from ebay partner network. I was having trouble getting accepted prior to that, even with all my experience in the business. The solution for me was to go to the convention and find them, meet them and get in the network. That is exactly what I did.

EPN is an affiliate program, but it is different than many other programs in many ways. However, before I talk about how it is different I want to say that ebay is an important player in our performance marketing space. They used to host their affiliate deal with CJ and did so for many years, but finally in 2008 they switched to their own dynamic system within ebay.

Now they have become the first affiliate program I know of the pay by the relative value of the click, rather than by the value of the sale. In all actuality, the amount affiliates earn is similar or the exact same in most cases, but when they first converted to the pay per click method it was alarming to many in the industry. I know however, that all they are really doing is to track all activities within each visit, and then share with the affiliate partner based on ALL the activity of the visitor. In some cases they are paying more per visitor if that visitor does nothing financial but clicks ads.

So just to compare things, say you send a visitor to your affiliated merchant page and that visitor clicks on the merchant's Adsense. In normal circumstances you would not be compensated at all since your visitor did not buy from the merchant. ebay may not host Adsense ads, but they have other paid ads on the site, and if all your visitor does is click a paid ad, you do receive a portion of the income from that click. So ebay has a revolutionary system where you the affiliate have more opportunities to earn from your traffic. My view of their new system is that it works very well and I have more potential there for income, so I send as much traffic to them as I can.

Just for good perspective on the ebay system, read this interesting article on the Associate Programs site about Jake Becker and his Watchcount ebay shopping site.

Affiliate Marketing Case Study: Jake Becker’s Watchcount