eBay will launch a new affiliate plan for sellers to encourage them to drive traffic to the eBay marketplace. The eBay Partner Network program (ePN) rewards affiliate marketers for driving traffic and sales and is set to launch a new plan for sellers.
The news comes as eBay makes some unpopular changes to ePN, including news that eBay is decommissioning the Dynamic Feed Generator at the end of June, which we reported on the AuctionBytes Blog on Sunday.
eBay Vice President of Seller Operations and Engagement Marni Levine made the announcement in a video, available on YouTube.
She did not provide specifics, but said eBay would announce the plan in about 3 weeks.
Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.
At this point, eBay hasn’t much choice to include sellers from what I can see. They’ve lost a lot of publisher affiliates due to the drastic cuts in the commissions and cookie duration over the last 6 or so years. It sounds like a “Hail Mary” to me to try and boost affiliate traffic. We’ve been affiliates for over a decade and have watched our own revenues plummet by 60 or 70% from the highs a few years back. It’s a mess.
Ebay has to be able to pay those golden parachute payments somehow and just as they continue to dig deeper and deeper into sellers pockets to show some kind of growth now they have to start cutting other costs so they can continue to pay ridiculous salaries for employees who have no idea how to fix what is wrong with the company. This is just a continuation of what Wenig did to try and continue to show profits when in fact the company was losing ground in all areas, including advertising. They still don’t understand that these types of moves do nothing to help the company grow or come close to drawing those that have left back into the fold.
The eBay partner network is a total mess. Understaffed and Underpay their affiliates. Sellers beware!