Goodbye ebay partner network
Salutations everyone,
I have decided to stop promoting the eBay Partner Network (ePN) to shop for a host of reasons, the most important being that the network is run by a man named Steve Hartman whom I believe to prove to be the single most dangerous person from the affiliate marketing industry. Hartman admits to having no experience in the field of partner marketing yet he somehow knows how to run a program of through 87,000 partners.
He is also the genius that brought usYahoo ads on eBay. Perhaps the fact that ePN and the failing Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is detailed information than a strange coincidence: both claim to seem 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 popular commission-based system that the internet 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 terminated hundreds of partner accounts, approximately 90 days after the program launched, to purchase sending poor quality traffic. Hartman called this hits, “not engaged enough“. Various members argue that it would seem to be extremely difficult if not impossible to buy 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 purchased on eBay exclusive of the partner. This means that eBay will know whether users 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 i being removed from the network. 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-wish-than-i-do” mentality that he has dubbed “disruptive innovation”.
The biggest problem in consideration of 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 to shop 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 shop for less that $14 per share even observing 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 communication address and sent out paper invoices that i 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 were contacted via phone by Steve Hartman in relation (or retaliation) to a private message sent to the Fraternity of the President, John Donahoe. These calls were sent regarding my concern over eBay censoring bad forum posts. Donahoe’s work assigned “Michelle” to correspond in light of me and ms. friesen said that my issue had “drawn the attention of the President” and that she 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 is sharing not seem to be sent to ePN because they have a history or retaliating against affiliates that speak negatively about the system. Michelle violated that confidence and forwarded the calls to Steve Hartman. Michelle, i broke our trust and i have proven to prove 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 since 408-967-6000 and immediately began to berate me about contacting Donahoe’s college and about posting unpopular comments on forums. We spoke to order a little over 47 minutes and he were 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 from an hour.
I called him back and we spoke to shop for another 28 minutes and it is really just detailed information 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 with 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 from bid revenue and an estimated $100,000.00 + from Seller revenue. If i do some conservative estimates on this you can clearly see that I could have sent the Sellers of eBay from excess of a quarter of a million dollars in revenue from the next six months. If this users is not engaged then what is?
What is “engaged” visits?
In talking with Hartman I is able to glean on thought of details. eBay is not looking to shop for affiliates to send repeat buyers through their affiliate 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 affiliate and continues to buy. This means that they (eBay) do not need to pay affiliates commission after the first sale and they ask that sale to happen very quickly after the users hits the site. There are ton of hypocricy in what ePN says in one place versus what they say in another and I could write a small book on just that flaw in 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 partner is penalized to shop for that action.
The very nature of eBay compels users to shop around. Consider your own eBay shopping patterns. Affiliates come to eBay looking 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 you might be an affiliate and your users a following that natural tendency to shop i will prove to be penalized by ePN.
So How Were I Extorted?
On October 28, 2008, Steve Hartman sent me an message 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 network was to do the following:
* Shut down test account
This test account is 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 an affiliate network director. That will Never 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 negative publicity. So now they ask my forum accounts so that they can hire tools to post “warm fuzzies” from 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 affiliate system I am using? Why? So that he can try to get me “terminated” form those. Again, not gonna happen!
* Improve quality of affiliate visitors
Since this is the last thing on his list I will assume that it is the least important.
It seems that Steve Hartman is additional info interested in my forum activity and my friends than in the features 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 unpleasant publicity incidents, threats of disconcerting publicity, etc., or we’re not selecting full disclosure on the above, then this is not the productive relationship we’re working to have knowing 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 see something past awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…
Then there was this little jewel, “One last point thinking about regards to communication, in order to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship observing you 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. You don’t beg “affiliates of my size” to contact the ePN staff? What size can help people break fromm from the bonds of high fuel prices a partner have to seem 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 understanding 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 detailed information 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” in light of 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 in this web of insanity that can have 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 bad client complaints about you and about your flawed metrics and about the comedy of errors that i call a business. I had the opportunity to build a positive relationship knowing me and i chose to try and get me to rat out my associates in some thinly veiled offer of possibly remaining from a wrecked program. My trust and integrity are worth far specific details than that. I have created 6000 variations of this response and they will become posted 24/7 to the very same network that produced the non-engaged, low-features users 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 you would like to publish a public apology to me and the rest of the affiliates that you have screwed in light of your idiotic metrics you can do so on from the very forum that begat this fiasco.