www.affiliateconfession.com

I absolutely love the eBay affiliate program. I’m sure you already know that, but now I like it even better that the whole deal is being run by eBay itself through the eBay Partner Network. The tracking appears to have improved, it’s much easier to tell what you’ve actually sold as an eBay affiliate and commission updates take about half the time as they did with CJ. Plus, this month only, eBay is paying out an additional 5% on commissions to encourage affiliates to quickly make the change over to EPN.

One of the nicer things about the switch to the EPN is that it is so much easier to get reports and to see what you sold. To do that all you have to do is log into your EPN dashboard and click Reports at the top of the dashboard, then click Transaction Download and you will see a screen like below:

One you get to this screen, you can then select your date range (I choose the entire month of April so far) and then click to download as a text or Excel file. When you download the report as an Excel file it’s now incredibly easy to find the item you sold because all you have to do is look for the column labeled eBay Item ID and there are the number ID’s of the auctions you drove a buyer to. Just take those numbers, you may have to double click on the individual cell so the number doesn’t display as scientific notation, go to eBay and plug it into the main search box and you will go to the specific auction you were credited for. 

The cool thing about eBay and why I like it so much is you end up selling lots of unrelated items because people love to buy through an auction and people love to buy on eBay. Here are a couple of items below that showed up in my latest report that have nothing to do with anything I sell or any niche that I’m in. However, I got the commission just because I sent the buyer to eBay and they took some sort of action that ended in a purchase within 7 days of landing on the eBay web site.

200212428009 - Tickets to a Detroit Tigers vs Chicago White Sox baseball game.

140219933308 - A Callaway Golf Used X Headcover for a driver.

While these items only earned me a tiny commission, I’m sure you can see the potential benefit here. It was reported yesterday in the Build A Niche Store forums that someone earned a commission over $500 for selling a very expensive musical instrument that was also completely unrelated to anything they are targeting as an affiliate. That just shows you what can happen when you get people to eBay. I’d love to divulge what that musical item was, but that’s a niche that I’m going to start another store for.

If you are an affiliate marketer and aren’t a part of the eBay Partner Network, you are missing out big time.

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I just got an email from support at ShoppingAds.com  and there’s great news for all ShoppingAds / AuctionAds affiliates, you won’t need to do anything to your widgets, code or links for the big eBay affiliate program changeover. Apparently everything will be switched over on their end so their affiliates can rest easy. Support said that there might be a slight reporting delay, but other than that you probably won’t notice anything.

I can’t tell you how happy that makes me because I have tons of links in USFreeAds.com classifieds, on blog posts and other web sites and I was dreading the switch. This should be quite reassuring for all eBay affiliates and stem the worldwide panic just a bit. If ShoppingAds will smoothly get through the eBay affiliate transition, then we as individuals shouldn’t have too much to worry about. All your present eBay affiliate links go through a redirected eBay domain anyway so I’m guessing all we will have to do is possibly change our affiliate codes in all of our links, but it might even be simpler than that and only require signing up for the eBay Partner Network. Of course, we’ll just have to wait and see.

I received a rather nasty comment just yesterday (which I deleted) making fun of BANS users in regards to the switchover from CJ to the eBay Partner Network. The writer thought Build A Niche Store would now be rendered useless. All I can do is laugh at that kind of thinking because the BANS developers have everything under control and will issue a quick fix probably sometime tomorrow after they sign up for the new eBay affiliate program. The fix shouldn’t consist of more than 2 or 3 files that will just need to be ftp’d to your BANS directories.

I’m kind of looking forward to the change and anxious to see how eBay is going to enhance their already incredible affiliate program. It’s nice to know at least ShoppingAds and BANS will require little to no effort to make the switch. Looking forward to tomorrow.

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Okay, it’s not as bad as the headline indicates, but all eBay affiliates received the news this morning that the company will be moving away from Commission Junction managing their affiliate program and they will bring it in-house, running it themselves. The change is due to start on April 1st and all present and new eBay affiliates will have to sign-up through the eBay Partner Network. CJ links to eBay will still work through the end of April and must be migrated by May 1st.

As you can imagine this has cause quite a buzz on blogs and the major internet marketing forums around the net as eBay affiliates panic at the amount of work they they are facing replacing links next month for the transition. I will personally have several hundred pages of links to migrate over to the new program and I’m a small player compared to some of the big guys. There’s a guy in the eBay affiliate forums saying he has some 75,000 links to change and there are even bigger players to the tune of $1 million per month facing this transition as well.

I’m not at all worried about any of my BANS stores because everything there is automated and will probably just require a minor file update and possibly changing an affiliate number in all of the store interfaces. What I am concerned about is all the text links I have in blog posts, on web sites and who knows where else. I honestly don’t know if I can find every single link I have out there and can change it over, much less if I had tens of thousands or more such as the big players do.

There are a few positive things to look at though with eBay handling all their affiliate matters. You will be able to register with all eBay countries affiliate programs throughout the world simultaneously, no more individual country sign-ups, there will be more detailed reporting available to affiliates (I’m sure this will help you target your efforts better), the commission structure won’t change, there will be new landing page optimization options and a few other changes for the better.

I don’t know how all this will pan out and it seems like a daunting task for some affiliates however, eBay owns the redirect url for all their affiliate links (rover.ebay.com) so it may not be as bad as we think. I’m sure eBay has thought this through and how much it might affect their business and we know they want to do something positive as the final outcome. If eBay affiliates don’t make money, eBay doesn’t make as much money. More details will be coming out shortly.

Meanwhile, if you have a BANS store, just keep building.

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One of the things that frustrates many Build A Niche Store users and eBay affiliates in general is that they can’t figure out what specific items they’re earning commissions on. I see this question, or rather frustration, expressed in many forums, blog comments and many other places on the net. This would be valuable information for the affiliate marketer because you could then target this info better on your site if you knew what your hot selling items were.

So you can’t know for sure what you sold through the eBay affiliate program, that’s a bummer. Oh, but you can, and it’s not all that difficult. All you need is Microsoft Excel or any program that opens Excel documents or tab separated files and access to your CJ account.

Here’s how you do it:

Log into CJ and click on Run Reports in the top left tabs. Next, right below where it says Run Reports – Transaction Reports, click on Report Options and you will get a box that looks like this:

Once you do that, click on the drop down box under Select Report Type and select Commission Detail. When you do that, the next box below will change to say Advertisers: All. Click on that drop down box and select eBay from your list of advertisers. Go to the next section down labeled Filter Results By and in the box labeled Web site: All, select your web site that you want to see eBay stats on.

Next, go over to the right a little and under Select Time Frame, click the radio button that says Date Range and select the date or dates that you want to find specific transactions for. Your screen should now look like the one below:

Click on Generate Report and you will then be taken to a screen that looks similar to the one below. You could have either more or less transactions depending on how many sales you had that day for that site.

Once you are there, scroll down to the bottom of the report where it says Download Report and select Excel from the drop down box and then click Submit. You will then get a dialog box that asks you if you want to open or save the file, click Open and Excel will open with your details. With my example there will be only three lines in the spreadsheet, one is an Advanced Lead and the other 2 will say Winning Bid under the Auction Name column. Follow the Winning Bid row and scroll over the the far right of your spreadsheet and look for a column that says Order ID. If you followed everything correctly you will now see a cell full of numbers like the one below:

BAM! You now have exactly what you’re looking for. Highlight the second number in the cell and copy it to your clipboard. Now go over to eBay and plug it in to the main search box and see what comes up. Item number 310023014821 on eBay is a Romanian 500 Lei silver coin that earned me a $1.66 .83 commission.

Pretty cool, huh? You can do that with any item sold on eBay and you never have to wonder again what you’ve sold through the their affiliate program.

But wait, there’s more…

What if you want to check out all the items you sold in a particular day or period of time? It would be a drag to have to plug in every number one at a time to find out which items you sold if you had several. Today is your lucky day because there’s a way to list all your items at once. On the right hand side of the main search box on eBay click on Advanced Search and you will get a screen like below. Make sure you click on the box that says Completed listings only and put in all your numbers either space or comma separated. You do have to sign in to eBay to use this feature. If you don’t already have one, you can get an eBay account here.

Click on Search and see what you get:

As you can see, I sold the coin mentioned above and a Dell keyboard through the same site. That’s the beauty of the eBay affiliate program. You can earn commissions on two completely unrelated items because you get credit for whatever purchases someone makes within a 7 day period.

Use this valuable information to target your visitors with the most popular items you’re selling or just to see what’s bringing in the big commissions. Have fun and earn some bucks with the eBay affiliate program.

Cheers,

Alan

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