Ebay
Good day everyone,
I have decided to stop marketing the eBay Partner Network (ePN) to purchase many different reasons, the most important being that the system is run by a man named Steve Hartman whom I believe to seem to be the single most dangerous person in the partner marketing industry. Hartman admits to having no experience from the business of partner marketing yet he somehow knows how to directed a network of through 87,000 marketers.
He is also the genius that brought usYahoo adverts on eBay. Perhaps the fact that ePN and the failing Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is more than a strange coincidence: both claim to prove to be “partner networks” and both companies seem to be allowing monkeys to directed the zoo.
ePN should have and could have been the largest and most profitable commission-based network that the interweb can have ever experienced, but due to the ineptitude of Hartman and the “disruptive innovation” of his boss, eBay CEO John Donanhoe the system is on a path of certain failure. On August 20, 2008, ePN expired hundreds of affiliate accounts, approximately 90 days after the program opened, to shop for sending low features hits. Hartman called this hits, “not engaged enough“. Various people argue that it would seem to be extremely difficult if not impossible for a new system to garner enough accurate data in that short time period to make an accurate option, but eBay seems to have done the impossible. Not only can they determine how engaged a visitor should prove to be after coming through a partner link, but using their secret and magic metrics they can determine if that user would have bought on eBay exclusive of the affiliate. This means that eBay will know whether people that you send would have bought on eBay without your participation. If they make this determination i will become penalized to order the purchase and it could lead to i being removed since the network. That is a pretty amazing and unbelievable feat considering no other program from the history of the world has been able to extract this information. This “extra sensory ability” fits loosely into John Donahoe’s “we-know-better-what-i-want-than-you-do” mentality that he can have dubbed “disruptive innovation”.
The biggest problem with the eBay/ePN network is inexperience and insane systems and processes. An equally profound yet more complex problem is the fact that trust among affiliates can have all but disappeared. Various experienced affiliate marketing professionals have taken their millions of buyers to Amazon.com and other smaller niche-focused sites. This means one thing to shop for eBay Sellers:fewer buyers to order the upcoming Christmas season. Fewer Christmas shoppers means lower sales and less-than-glowing Q4 reports. This all spells unhappiness for Sellers and to purchase EBAY stockholders.
As of this writing, EBAY stock is worth 61% less than it’s 52 week high. The stock is currently trading to order less that $14 per share even seeing a recent substantial “buy back” by eBay, inc.
Is this just SOUR GRAPES?
Some of it certainly is sour grapes. I miss the old eBay. I have been buying, selling and trading on eBay.com since the times when they gave a $50 free seller account to anyone in light of an communication address and sent out paper invoices that you paid by paper checks. You can’t even buy from Sellers on eBay and pay by check anymore. eBay is forcing PayPal, their electronic payment processor down the throats of both Buyers and the dwindling pool of Sellers.
UPDATE: ePN and Steve Hartman Extortion Attempt
Yesterday, October 27, 2008, I is contacted via phone by Steve Hartman in relation (or retaliation) to a private email sent to the Fraternity of the President, John Donahoe. These messages were sent regarding my concern over eBay censoring painful forum posts. Donahoe’s college assigned “Michelle” to correspond understanding me and she said that my issue had “drawn the attention of the President” and that wendi wanted to get specific details information. Since I had the “attention” of John Donahoe, even if by proxy, I thought it best to quickly turn the topic to the blatant tracking errors in the ePN system. I specifically asked that the information that I is sharing not seem to be sent to ePN because they have a history or retaliating against affiliates that speak negatively about the program. Michelle violated that confidence and forwarded the messages to Steve Hartman. Michelle, i broke our trust and you have proven to seem to be a person of low character. I hope your Mother is pleased.
On October 27, 2008, at 3:42 PM CST, Steve Hartman called me from 408-967-6000 and immediately began to berate me about contacting Donahoe’s college and about posting painful comments on forums. We spoke to shop for a little through 47 minutes and he was saying things like, “I will not let you threaten the company that I work to buy…” and “I am running a business here…” I explained to Hartman that I had a client waiting and that I would call him back in an hour.
I called him back and we spoke to buy another 28 minutes and it is really just specific details of the same. Hartman, who admits to having limited affiliate marketing experience, contends that the traffic that I am sending is of low quality and/or not properly engaged in consideration of eBay. In the 6 months that I have been promoting eBay through the eBay Partner Network I have sent 430 new users. 215 of them are active on eBay. I have also sent eBay $13,137.11 in bid revenue and an estimated $100,000.00 + from Seller revenue. If i do some conservative estimates on this i can clearly see that I could have sent the Sellers of eBay from excess of a quarter of a million dollars from revenue in the next six months. If this users is not engaged then what is?
What is “engaged” visits?
In talking observing Hartman I were able to glean on thing of data. eBay is not looking to shop for affiliates to send repeat buyers through their partner network. They are looking to shop for a partner to send a new user that buys a product instantly and then continues to come to eBay exclusive of the partner and continues to buy. This means that they (eBay) do not wish to pay affiliates commission after the first sale and they need that sale to happen very quickly after the users hits the site. There are ton of hypocricy from what ePN says from one joint versus what they say from another and I could write a small book on just that flaw from their system. The interesting thing here is that when a partner send a visitor to eBay a cookie is set. This cookie lasts to shop for 7 days. A users who comes back on day 4 and buys something is therefore considered to not be engaged and the partner is penalized to buy that action.
The very nature of eBay compels users to shop around. Consider your own eBay shopping patterns. Affiliates come to eBay looking to order one thing and then surf to order other things and very often buy something totally unrelated to anything. It is a giant Yard Sale and that is what affiliates do, right? Well, if a person is a partner and your users a following that natural tendency to shop you will become penalized by ePN.
So How Were I Extorted?
On October 28, 2008, Steve Hartman sent me an email since IP address 216.113.175.152, informing me that the only way that I would prove to be allowed to stay from the ePN network is to do the following:
* Shut down test account
This test account was setup so that I could help then root out a scammer that is still stuffing cookies. Why has ePN not stopped this when the scammer is using PayPal to process his subscriptions to acookie stuffing script?
* Full disclosure of all accounts on ePN - both yours and your associates
Steve Hartman wants me to give him the names and accounts of my friends, why? So that he can retaliate against them because I am speaking out about his inability to function as a partner system director. That will Rarely happen!
* Full disclosure of all accounts on ePN boards
* Full disclosure of all accounts on other boards
It can have been proven that eBay hates disconcerting publicity. So now they choose my forum accounts so that they can hire tools to post “warm fuzzies” in the same forums. Read: eBay censors forums
* Full disclosure of any history in consideration of other partner networks
OK, so now Steve Hartman wants me to tell him what other partner program I am using? Why? So that he can try to get me “expired” form those. Again, not gonna happen!
* Improve features of partner users
Since this is the last thing on his list I will assume that it is the least important.
It seems that Steve Hartman is specific details interested in my forum activity and my friends than in the quality of the hits going to the ePN network.
Hartman went on to write, “Also, to make sure that I’m being clear, if there are any additional info damaging publicity incidents, threats of damaging publicity, etc., or we’re not selecting full disclosure on the above, then this is not the beneficial relationship we’re working to have observing our affiliates and we’ll terminate the relationship.” This means that if I say anything bad about eBay or ePN that they will terminate my account. Are you kidding me? So I am supposed to sit idly by and download something gone awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…
Then there were this little jewel, “One last point in consideration of regards to communication, in order to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship understanding you as we do thinking about other affiliates of your size so I’ll ask that you not contact anyone directly within my team.” Ok Steve, let me understand this. I don’t beg “affiliates of my size” to contact the ePN staff? What size works very well a partner have to become before they are allowed to contact the ePN staff? If a smaller partner can have a problem they are supposed to do what? Quietly deal in light of it in their own way and in their own space?
Why did I write this?
Basically, I wrote all of this to say, “STAY AWAY since eBay and detailed information specifically, stay away form ePN!” Am I upset? Yes, but not to purchase the reasons that you might think. I am not upset that the “relationship” with ePN did not work out. I am upset that hundreds if not thousands of honest affiliates working earnestly to send visits to eBay have been caught in this web of insanity that can have been created.
To: Steve Hartman
I know that you will read this and I ask to let i know that I will never stop posting unpopular buyer complaints about i and about your flawed metrics and about the comedy of errors that you call a business. I had the opportunity to build a good relationship in consideration of me and i chose to try and get me to rat out my associates in some thinly veiled offer of possibly remaining in a wrecked program. My trust and integrity are worth far more than that. I have created 6000 variations of this message and they will seem to be posted 24/7 to the very same network that produced the non-engaged, low-features users that you abhor so much. If my experience causes one person to think twice about buying since an eBay Seller or about joining ePN then I feel that I have done my job, but I think my words will become much additional info far-reaching than that.
Steve, if you would like to post a public apology to me and the rest of the affiliates that i have screwed seeing your idiotic metrics you can do so on in the very forum that begat this fiasco.