At first this was a shock to me when I received the email. Quality Click Pricing. “A new payout structure designed to further reward the affiliates who drive incremental transactions on eBay”. The announcement that eBay’s epN Affiliate Program is changing again shouldn’t be a shock. The fact that ePN instituted a filter for bot clicks around June 2009. Everyone thought this was to help publishers. Wrong!
ePN started filtering clicks because they had this major change all set up. They say they are changing payouts to reward the publishers who send quality traffic to eBay. Who knows about this. Sounds like eBay is changing the rules pretty dramatically this time.
ePN launched ran a 3-month limited beta of Quality Click Pricing starting May 1st. They paid 25 publishers through the new system and have already made a number of improvements based on our beta testers’ feedback. ePN Says.
Until now, eBay Partner Network was paying for sales and leads. With Quality Click Pricing, ePN now instead pays affiliates for each click sent to an eBay site. The price paid per click will still depend on the short-term and long-term revenue of the traffic that the publisher drives to eBay, but will now also take into account the incremental value of that traffic to eBay, i.e., whether a sale happened as a direct result of the publisher’s actions. The greater the incremental revenue and the higher the expected lifetime value of the customers an affiliate sends, the higher the EPC and total earnings the affiliate will receive. Earnings Per Click (EPC) will be set daily for the previous day’s traffic.
Since ePN took over the affiliate network in April 2008 many publishers have expressed concern if this is a sustainable business model. How can eBay Affiliate Publishers build and maintain a network of sites if the rules and payments keep changing. This is a clone of eBays business model. Sellers on the site have to adjust every couple months because eBay can’t get the business model it wants. This is the entire reason we stopped selling on the site.
So can affiliates depend on ebay to keep the affiliate business model they are now implementing? No would be my answer. This guys change like a salamander. One day they want one thing the next another.
Should we continue with ePN? Yes. eBay is one of the largest places to pull product into a website via API. No matter what ePN asks for as a publisher we need to build and maintain our ePN Accounts. Can’t say what the payout will be, but if you have a quality site then your website should work with the quality Click ePN System.
I must say it is growing more difficult to work with ePN. I find I will be working away on building websites and these guys come along every quarter and ruin my day. It is growing very tiresome dealing with a some what major chang every 3 months.
Another thought I have been dealing with is being rejected by major affiliate programs because of ebay links on websites. This has moved me to make my business multiple categories. A ePN Category, and a 2nd category for general marketing.
As we all know we shouldn’t put or eggs in one basket. This change at eBay isn’t the first and won’t be the last. Having many ways to make money is a must. After building some N1WAY Websites with PHPBay I will consolidate my ePN sites I want to keep and trash the rest. I want to do this to try and get my quality score up and let the account sit.
Good luck the my fellow affiliates. This should be interesting. Remember to have multible sales channels.
EPN isn’t worth signing up for anymore, so I wouldn’t waste your time. They just converted to a “pay per click” model, that pays less than Google Adsense. They word it as their Quality Click Pricing, which is basically a system to change your earnings to whatever they want to pay. EPN is going to pay about 1/4th of what is was paying before. This was verified with not just my account, but hundreds of other Affiliates, and 90% are being paid only a fraction of before, even though everything was white hat and quality traffic that converted.
Quality Click Pricing is designed to do one thing only – allow ebay to pay affiliates less and make more for themselves. Why? Because they can and there is nothing you can do about it as an affiliate.
Example, I earned 92.00 for sept. Quality Click Pricing predicts my payment would be 32.00 for the same traffic.
What is wrong with that?
The 92.00 is based on actual earnings for auctions won by people who come to ebay through my links. Quality Click Pricing is based on Voodoo
Why is it ok for ebay to now claim that traffic that last month was worth 92.00 is worth only 32.00?
There can be only one reason since the 92.00 figure was based on actual auctions closed, a verifiable metric. ebay now simply wants to be able to pay affiliates less for the same amount of auctions closed. ebay is trying to claim the traffic is not performing but the fact is the traffic is performing exactly the same but will be paid out at a much lower rate. A rate that is about 2/3 lower then before.
I will be removing every ebay auction link I have and replacing them with affiliate links from a source who sells something from my site’s niche or adsense. Anything is better then dealing with a company who just wants me to be happy being screwed.
ebay, you suck!
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EPN is a joke. When they changed from CJ to EPN I lost about 50% revenue, and now that they are doing this quality click junk I’ve lost another 50% of my revenue. I’m going to be re-working most of my websites that run epn to amazon or something else.
the people at feebay have lost there minds when it comes to making everyone happy. They have gone away from the original model that made them what they are today. I would not be surprised if this new move made a huge difference in the traffic at eBay.
In the era of Internet transparency, so many individuals can see first hand how a company like Ebay changes their rules to simply maximize their bottom line. They are slaves to their shareholders and their stock price, and that will be their undoing. As of this year (2010) their new total fee is 15% which is still competitive with a local auctioneer, but can they continue to raise this percentage? Of course not.
New alternatives to selling online are emerging all the time…back to listing things on MY web site.