Steve hartman of ebay’s partner network is an idiot
Hi everyone,
I have decided to stop marketing the eBay Partner Network (ePN) to order many reasons, the primary being that the system is directed by a man named Steve Hartman whom I believe to become the single most dangerous person from the partner marketing community. Hartman admits to having no experience from the business of affiliate marketing yet he somehow knows how to controlled a system of over 87,000 partners.
He is also the genius that brought usYahoo ads on eBay. Perhaps the fact that ePN and the struggling Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is specific details than a strange coincidence: both claim to prove to be “partner networks” and both companies seem to prove to be allowing monkeys to controlled the zoo.
ePN should have and could have been the best and most profitable commission-based network that the interweb has ever seen, 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 partner accounts, approximately 90 days after the system began, to order sending poor features traffic. Hartman called this traffic, “not engaged enough“. Various members argue that it would seem to be extremely difficult if not impossible to buy a new network to garner enough accurate data in 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 purchased on eBay exclusive of the affiliate. This means that eBay will know whether users that i send would have purchased on eBay without your participation. If they make this determination i will prove to be penalized to purchase the purchase and it could lead to you being removed since the network. That is a pretty amazing and unbelievable feat considering no other system in the history of the world can have been able to extract this data. This “extra sensory ability” fits loosely into John Donahoe’s “we-know-better-what-i-want-than-i-do” mentality that he can have dubbed “disruptive innovation”.
The biggest problem knowing the eBay/ePN network is inexperience and insane systems and processes. An equally profound yet detailed information 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 for the upcoming Christmas season. Fewer Christmas shoppers means lower sales and less-than-glowing Q4 reports. This all spells unhappiness for Sellers and 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 buy less that $14 per share even with 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 days when they gave a $50 free seller account to anyone in light of an email address and sent out paper invoices that you 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 was contacted via telephone by Steve Hartman from relation (or retaliation) to a private communication sent to the Fraternaty of the President, John Donahoe. These messages were sent regarding my concern through eBay censoring negative forum posts. Donahoe’s office assigned “Michelle” to correspond with me and ms. friesen said that my issue had “drawn the attention of the President” and that she wanted to get detailed information 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 were sharing not be sent to ePN because they have a history or retaliating against affiliates that speak negatively about the network. Michelle violated that confidence and forwarded the communication to Steve Hartman. Michelle, you broke our trust and i have proven to become 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 disconcerting comments on forums. We spoke to purchase a little over 47 minutes and he is saying things like, “I will not let you threaten the company that I work to shop for…” 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 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 visitors that I am sending is of low quality and/or not properly engaged knowing eBay. From 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 from bid revenue and an estimated $100,000.00 + from Seller revenue. If you 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 visits is not engaged then what is?
What is “engaged” visitors?
In talking understanding Hartman I was able to glean on thing of data. eBay is not looking for affiliates to send repeat buyers through their partner network. They are looking for an affiliate to send a new user that buys a product instantly and then continues to come to eBay exclusive of the affiliate 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 in 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 an affiliate send a visitor to eBay a cookie is set. This cookie lasts to buy 7 stages. A users who comes back on day 4 and buys something is therefore considered to not become engaged and the affiliate is penalized to shop for that action.
The very nature of eBay compels users to shop around. Consider your own eBay shopping patterns. Bloggers come to eBay looking to shop for one thing and then scour to buy other things and very often buy something totally unrelated to anything. It is a giant Yard Sale and that is what members do, right? Well, if one is an affiliate and your users a following that natural tendency to shop i will become penalized by ePN.
So How Is I Extorted?
On October 28, 2008, Steve Hartman sent me an communication from IP address 216.113.175.152, informing me that the only way that I would seem to be allowed to stay in the ePN network is to do the following:
* Shut down test account
This test account were setup so that I could participation 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 an affiliate system 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 damaging publicity. So now they request 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 seeing other partner networks
OK, so now Steve Hartman wants me to tell him what other partner system I am using? Why? So that he can try to get me “cancelled” 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 detailed information interested in my forum activity and my friends than from the features of the users 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 negative publicity incidents, threats of disconcerting publicity, etc., or we’re not getting full disclosure on the above, then this is not the nice relationship we’re working to have thinking about 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 view something lonesome awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…
Then there were this little jewel, “One last point observing regards to communication, from order to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship in consideration of i as we do observing other affiliates of your size so I’ll ask that i not contact anyone directly within my team.” Ok Steve, let me understand this. I don’t request “affiliates of my size” to contact the ePN staff? What size really works a partner have to seem 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 seeing it in their own way and from their own space?
Why did I write this?
Basically, I wrote all of this to say, “STAY AWAY since eBay and specific details specifically, stay away form ePN!” Am I upset? Yes, but not to buy 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 users to eBay have been caught from this internet of insanity that has been created.
To: Steve Hartman
I know that you will read this and I ask to let i know that I will seldom stop posting unpopular 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 thinking about 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 system. My trust and integrity are worth far specific details than that. I have created 6000 variations of this reply and they will be posted 24/7 to the very same network that produced the non-engaged, low-quality visitors that i abhor so much. If my experience causes one person to think twice about buying from an eBay Seller or about joining ePN then I feel that I have done my job, but I think my words will be much additional info far-reaching than that.
Steve, if i would like to publish a public apology to me and the rest of the affiliates that you have screwed observing your idiotic metrics i can do so on from the very forum that begat this fiasco.