Dumping EPN (Ebay Partner Network)

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We have made the decision to no longer include the Ebay affiliate programme on any of our affiliate websites because we are fed up with the extreme waste of our effort as well as our customers’ efforts to get accepted or in 99.9% of cases, declined.  Therefore, even if a website advertised on Ebay shows an Ebay page it will not include this page unless you are already an ‘honoured’  member of EPN or, assure us that you want to go through the long and involved soul-destroying process of attempting to be accepted by them.

I am sounding somewhat cynical on this matter, because I am …. it would seem that they have a top secret agenda as regards acceptance, why this has to be top secret I have no idea.  From what I can gather the acceptance criteria ‘could’ be the following:

1. Have a high traffic site (500+ visitors per day)

2. Have a great deal of content (takes time to build – we are talking 100 pages+ here)

3. Live somewhere like Singapore (I have heard that if you have an address in Singapore you are accepted within 10 minutes of making the application, irrelevant of what your website looks like)

It may however be that they are just not accepting any more affiliates and may well dump all the affiliates they currently have! (This dumping of affiliates has happened before, during the changeover from Comission Junction managing the affiliate programme to it becoming  inhouse (EPN), a number of highly paid affiliates were dropped for no apparant reason).  Ebay has of late been spending vast amounts on tv advertising and it could well be that this is where they have decided their advertising budget is better spent instead of on affiliate commissions.

It’s all speculation, and I don’t know anyone personally who works for EPN, therefore we are left with speculation and a ton of refusals with the same lame cookie-cutter refusal email being sent out at the end of the torturous approximate 3 week wait!

To add insult to injury, if you were one of the lucky ones to be included in this elite group of affiliates, Ebay have in the last couple of months changed their payment structure. Whereas you used to be paid (very well) for new sign ups and a percentage of sales commission, they have now dropped new sign up commissions and sales commissions and operate instead on a pay per click basis. This has resulted in earnings tumbling  as each click is worth a measly 1c (and it’s not even each click, as some clicks are on products which are deemed not payable out on – the exact criteria of what decides this is again not public knowledge).

So, rant over … but it is worth giving some thought as to whether you actually want to bother with Ebay and whether your efforts would be better spent looking into alternative affiliate programmes within your niche to promote.

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