eBay affiliate | Croncast - Life is Show Prep

Major eBay Affiliate Program Changes

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:40:03 -0500

No clue how I missed this but one of major contributors to keeping the Croncast server humming, the eBay affiliate program, is being overhauled by eBay.

eBay will no longer use Commission Junction to run their program they will be taking it in-house. It will be interesting to see how eBay changes the program and what their reporting interface will look like. Hopefully, it will be easier to read and offer more information about the types of sales and leads that affiliates generate for eBay.

My only real concern is what the payout structure for affiliates will look like. With all the recent changes in seller's fees and feedback it makes me a bit nervous that eBay will lower the payouts to affiliates. I've become accustomed to accepting their money and very much like the $25 for new signups and fifty-percent of sellers fees.

The new program goes in to effect on none other than April Fools Day 2008.

Are they trying to send affiliates a message?

Tags: iPod eBay affiliate program commission junction

Current TV + FeedBurner = Ebay Auctions?

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:46:01 -0600

Hellooooo, Current TV, is anyone home?

Your main RSS feed has been hijacked, hacked or you simply decided not to use it anymore and another FeedBurner user picked up your user name.

What does that mean?

Starting yesterday at about 2 pm a flurry of new updates came through your main RSS feed. The problem is that all the updates are of auctions for Ebay items on Ebay UK.

The funny part is that the new burned feed is an Ebay affiliate RSS feed. Some joker has access to your entire subscriber base and is now hocking items on Ebay.

In the meantime, someone at Current who looks at stats, and wonders why your FeedBurner RSS referrals are down 100 percent from your feed, it is because something is severely wrong.

Tags: iPod Current TV FeedBurner Ebay RSS RSS Feeds dead RSS

maybe recession is looming - via twitter

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 09:21:13 -0600

but the purchases this month made from our ebay affiliate links say something different.

Tags: ebay affiliate recession

Apple Affiliate Program, Giving It Another Shot

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 11:47:16 -0600

I have no clue why I am giving the Apple Affiliate Program another shot. When you look at the numbers you will think I am crazy for trying again. I just can't get passed the fact that they sell a ton of iPods, MacBooks and now the MacBook Air and that we could possibly make a couple bucks from it.

Last year we were paid $0.00 by Apple after running a pretty aggressive campaign on Croncast and Resale Queen and in our RSS feeds. There is no way that in hades that not one single individual didn't buy the item they clicked on from the online Apple store in the 3 month span we ran the ads. It is illogical to look at the numbers (first table) and think that not one items was purchased from the online store within the cookie expiration period.

Advertiser	Commissions	S_Amount	Items	Sales	Leads	Clicks	Imps	CTR
eBay	$ XX	$ XX	47	598	84	351,500	59,514	590.61
Apple Store US & Apple Store Canada	$ 0.00	$ 0.00	0	0	0	218	31,192	0.69

Here's where we are in the last 4 days since I started running a couple ads in Betsy's Resale Queen feeds: blog posts and her podcast feed. The ads are for iLife '08 and the new MacBook Air. They are placed after the post item content and before the post tags.

Advertiser	Commissions	S_Amount	Items	Sales	Leads	Clicks	Imps	CTR
eBay	$ XX	$ XX	3	105	6	26,354	4,949	532.51
Apple Store US & Apple Store Canada	$ 0.00	$ 0.00	0	0	0	57	82	69.51

The clicks and impressions both are higher than I would have expected but maybe I did better targeting of the audience this time around. I doubt it. I think I was dead on during October, November and December to run iPod ads for shuffle, nano and video iPods.

I did contact the Apple Affiliate program through CJ during the second month to ask what the issue might be and never received a response.

For some reason I feel a need to go through with this again and hope that we can get our payout on a purchase from a lead that we created. I'll let you know how this goes.

Anyone else have experience with the Apple Affiliate Program?

Tags: MacBook Air iLife 08 Apple Affiliate Program Commission Junction eBay affiliate

Raise your Google PR, add 'nofollow' to affiliate links

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 09:59:56 -0600

For the last six weeks I have paid the price for forgetting to upload updated scripts that had the "nofollow" attribute added to text links. By not getting this done when I wanted I suffered the wrath of Google's PR (page rank) drops for those with "paid" text links.

Though, mine weren't paid, they are a home grown system that I wrote for the eBay affiliate program. Turns out the Google algorithm never asked if I was being paid for those links. Stupid robots.

The impact has been that our Google search referrals went down by over half!

This cut my average monthly take from Adsense and the eBay affiliate program to less than $200 combined. Barely enough to cover my server and not enough from Adsense to even get a payout last month. Bluh.

Since Monday I have been watching search referrals steadily climb and our Adsense and eBay money generation increase accordingly.

My recommendation to anyone that currently relies on search traffic to make some loot add rel="nofollow" to all of your text links that might be interpreted as paid.

And if you are using a text link ad company, ask them if they are using it. If not, make your own affiliate links and blaze a DIY trail that Google won't punish you for.

Tags: Adsense eBay affiliate eBay developer Google PR text links

Is your system working? I'll tell you for $75

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:19:12 -0500

For $75 and one hours worth of time I can ask eBay if their developer XML API service is broken. It has been down now for over 6 hours and not a peep in any message board, service update or email regarding it's status. However, if I want to pay the money I could ask a live human being for a yes or no answer. I need a service like that!!!!

Though I can say from the developer perspective errors like this are really helpful:

1) Http/1.1 Service Unavailable
2) [function.simplexml-load-file]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable

Are these errors account related? Is the service really down? Oy vey.

Any of you XML wizards have an idea of what I am encountering?

Tags: eBay affiliate eBay developer eBay API eBay XML developer