Steve hartman is the worst affiliate program director in the history of the internet
Salutations everyone,
I have decided to stop marketing the eBay Partner Network (ePN) for many different reasons, the paramount reason being that the program is directed by a man named Steve Hartman whom I believe to become the single most dangerous person in the partner marketing community. Hartman admits to having no experience from the field of partner marketing yet he somehow knows how to run a program 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 additional info than a strange coincidence: both claim to prove to be “partner networks” and both companies seem to be allowing monkeys to controlled the zoo.
ePN should have and could have been the largest and most profitable commission-based program that the net can have ever known, but due to the ineptitude of Hartman and the “disruptive innovation” of his boss, eBay CEO John Donanhoe the network is on a path of certain failure. On August 20, 2008, ePN expired hundreds of partner accounts, approximately 90 stages after the system opened, for sending poor quality users. Hartman called this users, “not engaged enough“. Many experienced publishers argue that it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to buy a new program to garner enough meaningful 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 seem to 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 hits that you send would have purchased on eBay without your participation. If they make this determination i will prove to be penalized for the purchase and it could lead to you being removed since the system. That is a pretty amazing and unbelievable feat considering no other network in 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-i-beg-than-you-do” mentality that he can have dubbed “disruptive innovation”.
The biggest problem knowing the eBay/ePN system is inexperience and insane systems and processes. An equally profound yet specific details complex problem is the fact that trust among affiliates has 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 buy 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 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 stages when they gave a $50 free seller account to anyone with an message 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 is contacted via phone by Steve Hartman from relation (or retaliation) to a private email sent to the College of the President, John Donahoe. These messages were sent regarding my concern through eBay censoring bad forum posts. Donahoe’s fraternaty assigned “Michelle” to correspond seeing me and wendi said that my issue had “drawn the attention of the President” and that ms. friesen wanted to get more 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 become 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 communication to Steve Hartman. Michelle, you 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 from 408-967-6000 and immediately began to berate me about contacting Donahoe’s office and about posting disconcerting comments on forums. We spoke to buy 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 were really just specific details of the same. Hartman, who admits to having limited affiliate marketing experience, contends that the visitors that I am sending is of low features and/or not properly engaged seeing eBay. From 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 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 hits is not engaged then what is?
What is “engaged” traffic?
From talking in light of Hartman I was able to glean on thought of info. eBay is not looking to buy affiliates to send repeat buyers through their partner network. They are looking 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 wish 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 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 for 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 shop for that action.
The very nature of eBay compels users to shop around. Consider your own eBay shopping patterns. Members come to eBay looking to buy one thing and then look all over 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 you might be a partner 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 from IP address 216.113.175.152, informing me that the only way that I would seem to be allowed to stay from the ePN system was to do the following:
* Shut down test account
This test account were 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 Never happen!
* Full disclosure of all accounts on ePN boards
* Full disclosure of all accounts on other boards
It has been proven that eBay hates negative publicity. So now they choose 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 seeing 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 “expired” form those. Again, not gonna happen!
* Improve quality of partner visits
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 from my forum activity and my friends than in the quality of the visitors going to the ePN system.
Hartman went on to write, “Also, to make sure that I’m being clear, if there are any more bad publicity incidents, threats of unpopular publicity, etc., or we’re not owning full disclosure on the above, then this is not the productive relationship we’re working to have understanding 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 lost awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…
Then there was this little jewel, “One last point in consideration of regards to communication, from purchase to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship observing i as we do in consideration of other affiliates of your size so I’ll ask that i not contact anyone directly within my team.” Ok Steve, let me understand this. You don’t wish “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 affiliate has a problem they are supposed to do what? Quietly deal observing 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 specific details specifically, stay away form ePN!” Am I upset? Yes, but not to shop for the reasons that i 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 traffic 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 choose to let i know that I will seldom stop posting bad homeowner complaints about you and about your flawed metrics and about the comedy of errors that i call a business. You had the opportunity to build a good relationship in light of 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 more than that. I have created 6000 variations of this message and they will 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 from an eBay Seller or about joining ePN then I feel that I have done my job, but I think my words will seem to be much additional info 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 knowing your idiotic metrics you can do so on from the very forum that begat this fiasco.