eBay have confirmed that as of 1st April, they will be running their own affiliate program, the eBay Partner Network. The Commission Junction-run program will end on 1st May, so that affiliates have a month to transition their accounts. Yes, we’re getting new links again!
Current tools for building affiliate links – the API, Editor Kit and Flexible Destination Tool – will remain the same. Affiliates will be able to register for multiple countries simultaneously, which is fantastic and long-overdue news. Combined with “landing page optimization and geo-targeting capabilities”, this sounds very promising indeed. We’re also promised “targetted banners” and more detailed reporting capabilities.
eBay are offering a 5% bonus on all traffic sent via the EPN to the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Italy, India and Spain eBay sites, and to Half.com (wot, no France?!) during April, so there’s your incentive to sign up early.
Not all current programs for eBay companies are affected: for example, Prostores, Skype and StubHub will remain with CJ; a full list is on the Affiliates Blog. Affilinet and TradeDoubler programs also remain in place. More details are available on the .com affiliates portal.
- Mashable, with interesting comments
- Computer World UK with some interesting comments from a big publisher
- Affiliate Tip
11 Responses
Good news..
I HATE the CJ web site.
yeh i read this on news.com to. its a good move i guess.
I’ve not had any problem with CJ, but if eBay have the techies to perform this tracking in-house, then it’s better they earn revenue/cost out from this stream than placing it on sellers.
What is a concern is that the programme goes live on April 1st, but we can not register until that date either. Updating affiliate programs and links could be a mammoth task, involving the editing of thousands of referral links. At best it will only involve changing the PID, at worst a complete re-write of the URL, with the CJ programme closing a mere 30 days later, this does not give a lot of time to iron out the changes.
Web and text based links will be the easy part as well – any software applications with embedded affiliate links will require updating, and this will be out of the direct control of many developers.
Speculatively though, could it even be possible to use existing protocol, and let the eBay Partner Network adapt, instead of the developers?
Steve, I’m really at a loss to see why the Rover links couldn’t just be ported to eBay so publishers didn’t need to change anything. However, as the Affiliates’ portal says More information, including detailed step-by-step instructions on how to migrate existing publishers’ links to the new platform, will be available on April 1st, it seems safe to assume this isn’t going to happen.
I love the new logo. I think that faceless representations of humanoids reflects both the personal and friendly service that is a hallmark of eBay.
I think the one at the back is Meg and the one at the front is Rajiv…..unless someone knows different? 😛
(Where’s Dunnohow?)
I wonder how this will affect sites built with programs like Build A Niche store and phpBay? Will all current eBay affiliates get new accounts or will we all have to reapply? I guess many of those questions will sort themselves out soon.
Lee, I think from the announcements today that all that info will be revealed on 1st April – bit annoying when we all want to get on with sorting things out *now* though.
Maybe the registration will be something as simple as entering your various CJ PID’s only – so no change to existing links etc ?
Or is that just wishful thinking ?
The BANS team seem to be working on an update patch which according to their forums, will be backwards compatible with all previous versions of the BANS.
It’s one of the benefits of paying for a scripted product I suppose, but it’s all those hand-coded sites that could be a proper PITA depending on the changes needed.
Hey guys, I had just switched to EPN today and I wrote a small patch for phpBay pro 2.1 to add support for EPN , if you don’t want to spend $50 on a new phpbay, you can purchase the patch on eBay here
Thank you guys, good luck!
https://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160225556699