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Good news for eBay affiliates, the eBay Partner Network will be expanding their stats starting next Wednesday October 22nd so you will now be able to see the specific categories where your sales are being generated. Not only will you be able to see the top level categories, but you will be able to see down to the 3rd sub category level.

An example report screenshot is below:

This is great news because many sales that eBay affiliates generate are not always in the categories or products they’re targeting. Since an eBay cookie lasts for 7 days once you send over one of your visitors, they can end up buying either closely related products to what you feature on your site or they may buy something not even remotely related.

This will now allow you as an eBay affiliate to see if your visitors are making purchases of related items and armed wth those stats you can now start to target items you may not have thought about in the past. For instance, maybe you have a BANS Store featuring model trains and in your research looking at the new category report you see that you are getting several sales in the antique model ship category, whodathunk? You can now include this category on your site or build a out a completely new site featuring these items.

You can also use the report to see the related categories that are already doing the best for you and likewise expand your efforts in that area. Maybe your model trains site specializes in HO scale Tyco trains, but you find many visitors are buying HO scale Lionel trains once they get to eBay, you can now put more emphasis on that category to feature it more prominently on your site.

At the present time you can download your eBay reports and see some of this information already, but the new category report coming out on October 22nd will allow you to get a quick look at the specific categories, in neat charts and graphs, where your sales are really happening. You can then act accordingly and tweak your Build A Niche Store site or whatever other kind of site you are using to take advantage of the eBay affiliate program.

You know, I could probably look it up, but I have no idea what ACRU actually stands for. However, for new eBay affiliates, what it actually is, will mean something different than it has in the past. It used to mean that eBay partners received a minimum of $25 for one of these which is a new eBay member sign-up who ends up placing a bid within 30 days of joining.

That has all changed as of today, again, for new affiliates only. New partners who sign up with eBay after August 1st will get paid for new eBay member sign-ups based on the quality of their traffic. The range will go from $1 per sign-up to $50. When I first read about this I thought there might be every level of payment in $1 increments, but it turns out there are only 4 levels that break down as follows:

Traffic Quality - Payment
Very Low - $1.00
Low - $10.00
Medium - $28.00
High - $40.00
Very High - $50.00

This looks like a pretty good payout, but it remains to be seen how eBay is going to determine traffic quality. And the way they are determining your traffic quality won’t be decided until the following month of when your ACRU’s are posted. In other words, if you get 6 new eBay sign-ups in August, you won’t know what traffic quality level you’re at and what you will be paid until the 9th of September.

One issue I see is that there are several days during the month when traffic takes a huge spike and doubles or triples from the average number of clicks I normally send to eBay. This seems to be some sort of a searchbot anomaly and greatly skews your EPC. It also would be nice if eBay would give some clearer guidelines as to what they define as low, medium, high and very high quality, especially since your level can change from month to month.

Suppose you send PPC traffic to a BANS store and it doesn’t work in that you get lots of clicks, but no buyers or no bidders. Is eBay going to take into consideration the numbers of clicks you send, bids that are place and winning bids placed. What about overall numbers of sales, will high volume affiliates be compensated accordingly? With eBay not disclosing their methods as things have been clearly defined in the past this leaves the door open for all sorts of issues and unhappy affiliates. It might be in eBay’s interest to be a little clearer on what they expect from the traffic being sent their way.

New affiliates will end up being the guinea pigs for this new ACRU payment system from eBay as affiliates who signed up before August 1st won’t be subject to the payments. However, later this year, all affiliates will be moved over to the traffic quality system for ACRU’s. I just hope my traffic quality comes in at medium or better. 

ACRU’s are only a small part, around 10%, of my total revenue from eBay, so this won’t be that big of a deal when the change goes into effect for all affiliates. But for those that do earn a lot of income from signing up new eBayers, this might have a huge impact on their bottom line. Let’s hope eBay works all the kinks out of this as soon as possible.

For some reading this post, it is going to be very basic affiliate and eBay related information mainly because you probably work with these kind of things every day. However, there are people who don’t have eBay accounts, have never purchased merchandise or have very limited experience buying anything online and don’t have much of an idea of how ecommerce or affiliate marketing works.

Lest you think negative of this, don’t, because it is a huge opportunity as there are still hundreds of thousands to millions of people yet to be added to the economy of the Internet. And many of these individuals also want to learn how to make money online, but don’t know what hosting is, don’t know how to build a web site, don’t know how to upload files to a hosting account and so forth. They have no idea where to start. This post is for those people and actually came out of a conversation I had with a friend recently who wants to break into this field.

For someone who wants to get started in affiliate marketing and knows nothing about how any of this works, I recommend the eBay affiliate program known as the eBay Partner Network (EPN) and Build A Niche Store (BANS) to fully take advantage of the EPN.

Here are the most basic sequential steps you take to get started with EPN and BANS. (there are other ways to do this, but these are the steps I have taken or feel most comfortable with)

These are all steps to do after you have either decided on a niche to exploit or have done your own research. (that’s a whole other lesson) In the case of the friend I was talking with a few days ago, she already had a pretty good idea of what she wanted to do and after a little research on my own, it looks to be a very profitable niche. You of course never know though until you get in there and do the work.

Take these steps to build your eBay affiliate niche store:

Get a Linux hosting account at either 1and1.com or HostGator.com. I have used 1and1.com and HostGator is the recommended web hosting service by the BANS developers.

Look up domain names at Godaddy.com. Try and get a good keyword phrase in your domain name without making it too long. I like to use Godaddy.com to look up names because of the suggestions they recommend if yours isn’t available. They are very basic suggestions, but if you don’t know it by now, I like simple.

Purchase your domain name. 1and1.com gives you 3 free domains with the $9.95 per month hosting plan and your domains are $15 extra per year with HostGator’s $7.95 per month plan.

Sign up to be a member of eBay if you don’t have an account already. You need to be a member of eBay to be an eBay affiliate.

Sign up with the eBay Partner Network.

Buy Build A Niche Store.

Read the Build A Niche Store manual so you understand how everything works.

Log into your hosting plan control panel and set up an ftp account. This is a simple operation and instructions for this should be easy to find once you log in to your hosting account.

Download Filezilla if you don’t already have a program to ftp (transfer) files to your web host. This is a great free program that allows you to upload all your files to your online account.

Sign up for the BANS forum because there will be issues with your store or with eBay (get use to it) and the forums are a great place to get help when you can’t figure things out on your own.

Upload and install the BANS software according to the instructions in the BANS manual.

Find the correct eBay category number(s) for your niche and create your store. Also, make a logo for your header according to the sizes for the template you are using (found in the manual).

Add titles, meta keywords, meta descriptions and H1 title tags (in content titles at the top of your pages) and product descriptions for every page on your site. Depending on the size of your site you can do all this in an afternoon or for larger sites it can take several weeks.

Continue to add content pages on an ongoing basis.

Once you get your store in working order, it is important to stay connected to the BANS forum for some time so you can understand the process of how your store works by seeing what other people are doing or are having trouble with. You can also get inspiration and ideas from other BANS users for new stores.

These are just the most basic steps to get your store up and running, but beyond this you need to promote your store which you can learn about in this post, and in this post.

Well the first full month’s report is in from the new eBay EPN affiliate network thingy (I’m still not sure how to refer to it) and with the inconsistency of earnings it reminds me of the movie Jaws. As you can see below there’s not any more than 2 days of steady earnings:

I find the up and down roller coaster earning levels a little weird. I mean, what’s going on here? Is there an effort on the part of eBay buyers to only make good on their payments just every other day? Is eBay not correctly reporting and still working on getting EPN up to speed? What’s weird is that if you average out my clicks per day, discounting a couple of 3,000 clicks per day anomalies, I come in around 250 to 300 each day and that’s a pretty consistent line. So why the inconsistency in earnings?

Well anyway, just to be goofy, I took my earnings line through the 26th and made a little illustration. I hope there’s no truth to this? The shark’s teeth match up perfectly with revenue:

Anyone else seeing a roller coaster ride of eBay affiliate earnings like this?

Utter panic, rioting, confusion and general mayhem in the streets has subsided with the recent announcement that eBay affiliates will be given till the end of May to change all their links and completely migrate over to the new eBay Partner Network. eBay announced last month that they would be leaving Commission Junction to manage their affiliate program in house and initially gave affiliates only 30 days make the switch.

I’m sure multitudes of eBay affiliates are breathing a sigh of relief today knowing that they don’t have to cram in possibly weeks worth of work in the next 3 days. I was looking at a very busy 3 day stretch here because I have one site in particular that still has some 60 pages of rss feeds that need to be changed. And other affiliates have huge sites or networks of sites with tens of thousands of links that still need to be converted.

eBay made the announcement about the migration extension on their blog on April 25. Stated in the post was eBay’s admission that only 66% of their affiliates had made the switch to EPN thus far, leaving another 33% lagging behind. It was definitely a smart move on eBay’s part to extend the deadline because 33% of their traffic from affiliates may not have reached the correct destination making for a possible combination of lost revenue and unhappy affiliates.

The extension will end on May 31, but because of contractual obligations, no commissions will be paid after that date. However, it would be a good idea to make all your changes before May 24th because there is a 7 day cookie set on any traffic sent to eBay. So to avoid losing commissions from clicks in May that end up converting in June, it’s best to get er’ done before the 24th.

It’s good to get a little leeway, but if you are an eBay affiliate don’t let it go too long and end up against the wall at the end of May. I was planning on finishing up everything by Wednesday, so maybe I’ll extend that to Friday. It’s best to stick with your original plans as close as possible.