eBay affiliates have long been puzzled about the strange rule that says we cannot promote our own listings. After all, traffic to eBay is traffic to eBay: they make the same FVFs on my listings as they do on those of my competition, so why ban linking to myself? As of March 8th, this changes. From an email received this morning from Commission Junction:
5) Affiliate Links. You may use affiliate links to promote your own eBay listings or eBay Store, those of your Agents or those of anyone else with whom you are affiliated. eBay may terminate this provision at any time with 7 days notice.
(a) You may not include affiliate links on any ebay.com page or eBay-owned page, such as an eBay listing or eBay Store.
The first sentence used to read “You may not…” We’re now seeking clarification of whether this will apply to the UK program too.
In rather less good news, the new revenue sharing scheme has one huge disadvantage for affiliates over the old one: there is no longer a payout for non-winning bids. Meanwhile, exactly what constitutes “revenue” for the purposes of affiliate commission has still not been made clear.
4 Responses
Unless of course its a typo, and eBay omitted the word ‘not’ in error 🙂
Eddie, sometimes I think you’re more cynical than I am :O However, if the word “not” was omitted in error, then nothing has changed at all…
Hi Sue – is there an explanation of how the commissions are calculated? I’m trying to sort it out for large ticket items and just see examples on the ebay affiliate info pages of ACRU’s but not much detailed info on what if you send someone via your ebay aff link and they spend e.g. $30k… Thanks in advance.
Hi Peter,
Sadly, there isn’t any very detailed explanation – my big query is the definition of “eBay revenue”, which is not explained anywhere. Either Shawn Collins or someone in his comments did state that this was normal practice amongst affiliate programs, which might well be true but doesn’t help in cases like yours. Sorry I can’t be more help.