Ebay, go to hell
Hello everyone,
I have decided to stop promoting the eBay Partner Network (ePN) to purchase many different reasons, the paramount reason being that the system is run by a man named Steve Hartman whom I believe to be the single most dangerous person from the affiliate marketing field. Hartman admits to having no experience in the community of affiliate marketing yet he somehow knows how to controlled a system of over 87,000 members.
He is also the genius that brought usYahoo adverts 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 run the zoo.
ePN should have and could have been the best and most profitable commission-based program that the internet can have 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 terminated hundreds of affiliate accounts, approximately 90 stages after the system opened, to shop for sending low features visitors. Hartman called this visitors, “not engaged enough“. Many affiliates argue that it would seem to be extremely challenging if not impossible to purchase a new system to garner enough usable data from 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 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 hits that i send would have purchased on eBay without your participation. If they make this determination i will become penalized to order the purchase and it could lead to you being removed since the system. That is a pretty amazing and unbelievable feat considering no other system from the history of the world has been able to extract this info. This “extra sensory ability” fits loosely into John Donahoe’s “we-know-better-what-you-need-than-you-do” mentality that he can have dubbed “disruptive innovation”.
The biggest problem with the eBay/ePN system 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 buy 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 order 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 thinking about 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. 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 telephone by Steve Hartman in relation (or retaliation) to a private message sent to the Street of the President, John Donahoe. These emails were sent regarding my concern through eBay censoring bad forum posts. Donahoe’s company assigned “Michelle” to correspond understanding me and ms. friesen said that my issue had “drawn the attention of the President” and that wendi wanted to get additional info 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 prove 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 emails 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 work and about posting damaging comments on forums. We spoke for a little through 47 minutes and he was saying things like, “I will not let i threaten the company that I work 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 to order another 28 minutes and it is really just additional info of the same. Hartman, who admits to having limited partner marketing experience, contends that the visits that I am sending is of low features and/or not properly engaged observing 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 from bid revenue and an estimated $100,000.00 + from Seller revenue. If you do some conservative estimates on this you can clearly see that I could have sent the Sellers of eBay in excess of a quarter of a million dollars in revenue in the next six months. If this visitors is not engaged then what is?
What is “engaged” visits?
From talking observing Hartman I were able to glean on thought of article. eBay is not looking to order affiliates to send repeat buyers through their partner network. They are looking to purchase a partner 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 choose to pay affiliates commission after the first sale and they beg that sale to happen very quickly after the users hits the site. There are ton of hypocricy from what ePN says in 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 a partner 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 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. Experienced publishers come to eBay looking to purchase one thing and then search for 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 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 seem to be allowed to stay in the ePN program was to do the following:
* Shut down test account
This test account is 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 network director. That will Rarely happen!
* Full disclosure of all accounts on ePN boards
* Full disclosure of all accounts on other boards
It has been proven that eBay hates unpleasant 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 observing other affiliate 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 “terminated” form those. Again, not gonna happen!
* Improve quality 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 more interested in my forum activity and my friends than in 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 unpopular publicity incidents, threats of unpopular publicity, etc., or we’re not getting full disclosure on the above, then this is not the nice relationship we’re working to have with 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 i kidding me? So I am supposed to sit idly by and find something gone awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…
Then there was this little jewel, “One last point knowing regards to communication, from get to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship knowing i as we do understanding 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 want “affiliates of my size” to contact the ePN staff? What size works very well an affiliate have to be before they are allowed to contact the ePN staff? If a smaller partner has a problem they are supposed to do what? Quietly deal in light of 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 since eBay and more specifically, stay away form ePN!” Am I upset? Yes, but not to order the reasons that you might think. I am not upset that the “relationship” understanding ePN did not work out. I am upset that hundreds if not thousands of honest affiliates working earnestly to send visitors to eBay have been caught from this internet of insanity that has been created.
To: Steve Hartman
I know that i will read this and I request to let you know that I will rarely 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 beneficial relationship understanding me and you chose to try and get me to rat out my associates from some thinly veiled offer of possibly remaining in a wrecked system. My trust and integrity are worth far additional info 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-features visitors that you 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 become much specific details far-reaching than that.
Steve, if you would like to publish a public apology to me and the rest of the affiliates that you have screwed with your idiotic metrics i can do so on in the very forum that begat this fiasco.