What The Hell Is Happening At eBay?

I first started making money with the eBay affiliate program through Commission Junction, in fact getting on board with eBay was the only reason I joined CJ! I’d heard so many stories of people making a killing with eBay, they really do pay top dollar for new bidding sign-ups. However I never had much joy with getting new users for them, I did OK, just seemed that everybody I sent over was an existing user. I did do well out of their revenue share on successful bids for affiliates, overall I was happy. It was then that I discovered BANS. A PHP script designed for only one purpose, to build eBay powered store front websites with the goal of picking up commissions. This boosted my eBay income significantly. It was at this point eBay decided to split from CJ and setup the eBay Partner Network which I quickly joined and spent some time moving all my links.

From that day onwards strange things have started happening to eBay affiliates. Early reports of much lower CTRs were forgiven and put aside as teething problems with the new system. But then they started changing the payouts, all of a sudden the EPN was less profitable. It’s almost like they didn’t want affiliates. Then last week a number of affiliates (in their thousands and many of the very top eBay earners) were booted out of the program. The reason being…well nobody knows 100% for sure. eBay refused to give any real information, instead citing some nonsense about the long term value of affiliates referrals. Sorry eBay, but it’s the affiliates job to get the prospect over to you, it’s your job to keep them interested in eBay and bidding well into the future! eBay seem to have shifted the responsibility of “future profitability” to eBay of an affiliates referral onto the referral themselves! Excuse the language but that is f’in mental! In all my years online I’ve never ever heard anything like it.

I’ve no idea what this is going to mean to the long term future of not only the EPN or eBay as a whole. Luckily for now I still have my account, I presume because I was never that successful at getting the high commission new signups (It seems to be mainly the top earning new signup affiliates that have been bummed). I gone only imagine how annoyed I’d be if I’d spent years of my time, not to mention my own money on promoting a program that I was suddenly kicked out of with no real explanation. Anyone in that situation truly has my sympathy.

For now I’m going to only use the EPN and BANS as a test tool, it’s a real quick way of testing a niche for portability. At this point I certainly won’t be spending any real amount of time or money on promoting eBay. The question is, is eBay just consolidating or are they genuinely in trouble as a business?

(Just got another e-mail from eBay this morning:-

We’re making big changes on eBay.co.uk and eBay.ie, effective 24th September 2008, and they could affect the way you’re currently trading on the site.
Please take note of the following changes:

Fee changes
We will be making changes to our overall fee structure, including Insertion Fees and Final Value Fees.

Changes to eBay Shops
Fees for eBay Shops will change, and we will also be introducing new criteria to sign up for a Shop, for example, including Detailed Seller Ratings requirements.

Looks life they are going to make life less profitable/difficult for sellers as well)

Social Sharing: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.