If you have been around affiliate market at all you know about ePN. The eBay Partner Network. The network gives you access to one of the largest inventories of products online. Ebay affiliates enjoy one of the largest and dependable payouts in the business.
when eBay moved the affiliate network in April 2008 some serious changes took place. They went back through many if not all accounts and vetted them. During the vetting process many affiliates accounts where closed. The entire process was pretty scary for most account holders.
Know one knew what was happening. All kinds of people who lost account posted on the user forum. Some posts where honest people who got caught up in the vetting and some where users using black hat methods like cookie stuffing pretending to be in shock. In any event there was a new sheriff in town.
After the initial vetting ePN started revising the Terms Of Use on a regular basis. July 20 2009 was just another update to protect the eBay name in the online market place.
The first change is new ePN users must validate there websites. Beginning July 20th, all new applicants to the eBay Partner Network will be required to validate at least one domain during the registration process.
That said this was a major update and lots of questions remain. If you have a ePN account and do not adapt to the new terms your status could be at risk.
In order to cut through this here’s the basics. First go and read your ePN Terms Of Service. EPN forum moderators are answering questions as they find clarification of there own.
A big change is no more sending users to any eBay page from websites you do not own. This means blogspot and wordpress hosted sites are no longer allowed to send traffic to eBay. Other sites are included in this sweeping change. It appears as though ePN may change this, but we have not heard yet.
No more using any link shortening services that send users directly to eBay pages. Shoppers must be able to see the link they are click on in the status bar. This is not so clear either.
The point of most of these changes are to insure ePN Links are not spamming the internet. Users are still sending traffic from places like Craiglist and twitter which ePN has said for almost a year is against TOS. They seem to making this very clear and will start suspending accounts for it.
All the changes have raised many questions, but sense so much is still unclear we recommend protecting your account. We have a couple way you can do this.
RSS Feeds are now becoming a ify subject because of tools like PHPBay and other scripts that place ePN links in a post on wordpress. If someone scrapes your feed or uses it on another site your ePN link is not on a website you own.
A quick idea I have is to not show the entire feed. In wordpress admin go to read and choose each article in a feed show partial. That way the PHPBay Links at the bottom of your posts do not show up in the RSS Feed.
This should prevent your ads from showing on another website you don’t own. If they click through then they are sent to a page on your website.
ePN has said they will work with publishers on all the updates and enforcement. This is a good this because as usual ePN has opened a can of worms with a update to TOS.
We highly recommend heading over to the ePN Forum reading your terms of service. If you have any questions post on the board. If you are using any kind of automated software to redirect or your links are not clear to users you need permission.
Two important links you need are the ePN blog post and the forum thread discussing these changes
