Steve hartman can kiss my ass
Hello everyone,
I have decided to stop marketing the eBay Partner Network (ePN) to order a variety of reasons, the paramount reason being that the program is directed by a man named Steve Hartman whom I believe to seem to be the single most dangerous person in the partner marketing community. Hartman admits to having no experience in the business of affiliate marketing yet he somehow knows how to controlled a program of over 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 specific details than a strange coincidence: both claim to prove to be “partner networks” and both companies seem to seem to be allowing monkeys to directed the zoo.
ePN should have and could have been the greatest and most profitable commission-based network that the web can have ever seen, but due to the ineptitude of Hartman and the “disruptive innovation” of his boss, eBay CEO John Donanhoe the program is on a path of certain failure. On August 20, 2008, ePN cancelled hundreds of affiliate accounts, approximately 90 days after the network opened, to purchase sending poor quality users. Hartman called this visitors, “not engaged enough“. Various affiliates argue that it would seem to be extremely challenging if not impossible to purchase a new program to garner enough accurate data from that short time period to make an accurate decision, but eBay seems to have done the impossible. Not only can they determine how engaged a visitor should be after coming through an affiliate 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 visitors that you send would have bought on eBay without your help. If they make this determination i will become penalized to purchase the purchase and it could lead to you being removed from the program. That is a pretty amazing and unbelievable feat considering no other program from the history of the world can have been able to extract this information. This “extra sensory ability” fits loosely into John Donahoe’s “we-know-better-what-you-want-than-i-do” mentality that he has dubbed “disruptive innovation”.
The biggest problem seeing the eBay/ePN system is inexperience and insane systems and processes. An equally profound yet additional info complex problem is the fact that trust among affiliates has all but disappeared. Many experienced partner marketing professionals have taken their millions of buyers to Amazon.com and other smaller niche-focused sites. This means one thing 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 shop for 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 stages when they gave a $50 free seller account to anyone in light of an message address and sent out paper invoices that i paid by paper checks. I can’t even buy since 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 communication sent to the Frat of the President, John Donahoe. These messages were sent regarding my concern over eBay censoring painful forum posts. Donahoe’s company assigned “Michelle” to correspond thinking about me and ms. friesen 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 from the ePN system. I specifically asked that the information that I was sharing not become 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 calls to Steve Hartman. Michelle, i broke our trust and you have proven 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 fraternity and about posting disconcerting comments on forums. We spoke to purchase a little through 47 minutes and he was saying things like, “I will not let i 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 shop for another 28 minutes and it were really just detailed information of the same. Hartman, who admits to having limited partner marketing experience, contends that the hits that I am sending is of low features and/or not properly engaged with eBay. In the 6 months that I have been marketing 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 in 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” users?
From talking seeing Hartman I was able to glean on tidbit of info. eBay is not looking to shop for affiliates to send repeat buyers through their affiliate network. They are looking to buy an affiliate 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 request to pay affiliates commission after the first sale and they want that sale to happen very quickly after the users hits the site. There are ton of hypocricy in what ePN says from one place versus what they say in another and I could write a small book on just that flaw from their system. The interesting thing here is that when an affiliate send a visitor to eBay a cookie is set. This cookie lasts to order 7 stages. A users who comes back on day 4 and buys something is therefore considered to not prove to be engaged and the affiliate is penalized to buy that action.
The very nature of eBay compels users to shop around. Consider your own eBay shopping patterns. People come to eBay looking to purchase one thing and then scour to purchase other things and very often buy something totally unrelated to anything. It is a giant Yard Sale and that is what experienced publishers do, right? Well, if one can be a partner and your users a following that natural tendency to shop you will prove to be penalized by ePN.
So How Is I Extorted?
On October 28, 2008, Steve Hartman sent me an email from IP address 216.113.175.152, informing me that the only way that I would prove to be allowed to stay from the ePN program was 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 can have 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 program director. That will Seldom happen!
* Full disclosure of all accounts on ePN boards
* Full disclosure of all accounts on other boards
It has been proven that eBay hates disconcerting publicity. So now they want my forum accounts so that they can hire tools to publish “warm fuzzies” in the same forums. Read: eBay censors forums
* Full disclosure of any history in light of other affiliate 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 “cancelled” form those. Again, not gonna happen!
* Improve quality of affiliate 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 detailed information interested in my forum activity and my friends than in the quality of the visits going to the ePN system.
Hartman went on to write, “Also, to make sure that I’m being clear, if there are any additional info disconcerting 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 past awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…
Then there is this little jewel, “One last point seeing regards to communication, in order to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship thinking about i as we do understanding 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 need “affiliates of my size” to contact the ePN staff? What size really works an affiliate have to be 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 with it from their own way and in their own space?
Why did I write this?
Basically, I wrote all of this to say, “STAY AWAY from eBay and additional info specifically, stay away form ePN!” Am I upset? Yes, but not for the reasons that i might think. I am not upset that the “relationship” thinking about ePN did not work out. I am upset that hundreds if not thousands of honest affiliates working earnestly to send traffic to eBay have been caught from this interweb of insanity that can have been created.
To: Steve Hartman
I know that i will read this and I ask to let you know that I will rarely stop posting disconcerting homeowner complaints about i and about your flawed metrics and about the comedy of errors that i call a business. I had the opportunity to build a nice relationship with me and you chose to try and get me to rat out my associates from some thinly veiled offer of possibly remaining from a wrecked network. My trust and integrity are worth far additional info 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 traffic that i 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 be much more far-reaching than that.
Steve, if i would like to post a public apology to me and the rest of the affiliates that you have screwed with your idiotic metrics you can do so on in the very forum that begat this fiasco.