Archive for the ‘ebay’ Category
Tuesday · Popularity: 43% · affiliate, ebay, news
Today eBay announced the official opening of the eBay Partner Network (or EPN) which, in 30 days no less, will replace Commission Junction as the sole affiliate program for eBay.
For those casual users of the eBay affiliate program, the email this morning might come as a bit of a surprise but they have been working on this for some time, and promise to have a better reporting and functionality, although I have been very happy with Commission Junction for many years now.
The news didn’t go unnoticed by those in the blogging world where you could find several posts this morning like eBay Partner Network now live by Sue from Tamebay, eBay Dumps Commission Junction from Net Profits, a good discussion from Shoemoney in eBay Affiliate Program FINALLY Drops the CJ Dead Weight, and several others. For those working with the eBay affiliate program in one way or another, this is big news.
What is an Affiliate?
If you are unfamiliar with how affiliates work, it is a simple concept that has been around for quite some time. A company offers an affiliate partner (the user) an incentive of some kind, usually money, to promote their company. At this point almost all companies do this in one form or another, and even small ecommerce sites can setup affiliates for their customer. I am both an affiliate partner and an affiliate provider through one of our small ecommerce sites.
You can even see this on non-eccommerce site and large B&M companies. DirectTV has offered $50 to anyone who gets a friend to sign up for a new satellite TV account for a long time, this is just a simple affiliate offering that can be done by anyone who has a friend who needs their service.
How Much Does an Affiliate Pay?
This is always the question. How much can I actually make using something like this. The answer is just about as much as you are willing to put into building your affiliate network. For most of us, we don’t have a 40 hour work week we can devote to an affiliate program, so we use it where we can, when we can.
I have posted my most recent report below, so you can see it isn’t much. We current run about $100 a month on the eBay affiliate program but it doesn’t take much effort to produce results like that below. We have made as much as $500-$600 a month and as little as nothing. It all depends on how much work you want to put into the program.
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Friday · Popularity: 24% · amazon, dropshipping, ebay
Are you tired of competing with a drop shipper or drop shipping company that does not ever touch the product, house, or package the product, seems to sell more, and make more money than your competing businesses? You probably are if you are a company that spends time finding wholesalers, buying inventory, cataloging, indexing, valuing, packaging, and all the normal business practices that go along with running a business that carries an inventory based product.
I received an email this week from a “buyer” on Amazon. He purchased one of our books and the subject of his email said, DON’T SEND PACKING SLIP OR INVOICE PLEASE, in all caps, but it was his email to me that told me the story:
Would you mind sending this package without a packing slip and/or invoice? I would really appreciate it. Also, please use delivery confirmation, if possible - I only make this suggestion, as the USPS is far less likely to lose the package.
[item sold and order number was inserted here]
If this item is a different condition (used/new/etc.), binding or media type softcover/hardcover/tape/disc/etc.), edition or version (international/etc.) or differs in any way from your listing, please refund this order immediately.
You don’t need to respond to this email unless there is a problem with the order.
Besides the fact that Amazon requires you to send a packing slip with each order, the shipping address was completely different than the email name or company, so it was obvious to me that this was a drop shipper and we were now the fulfillment company. This email was automatically generated and I had no choice at this point other than to just ship the order.
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Tuesday · Popularity: 6% · ebay, news
eBay on Friday announced that a known fraudster, Vladuz, managed to hack into an old administrative menu system on eBay and suspended several eBay accounts. Actually, they specificall said he DID NOT hack in to any of eBay’s systems, but rather “he did this by accessing externally visible servers” said eBay spokeswoman Sharpe. This was initially reported by AuctionBytes on Saturday in Hacker Vladuz Accesses eBay Servers, Suspends Accounts but I am SURE many of these sellers spent a long time trying to figure out what happened and then trying to recover from everything that does happen when your account goes NARU.
Of course when this happens (and it happened to us, twice, by mistake), the steps to take are many, and are for another post, but in short what not to do are all the items on eBay’s list of don’ts, even if you know for a fact that you are correct, it will only make things worse to go against the grain if you want your account restored eventually. Especially when eBay tells you they don’t make mistakes like this, like they did in our case, it still didn’t matter that, yes, they actually do (and did) make mistakes.
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Monday · Popularity: 8% · amazon, ebay
Do you want to look more professional and drive more traffic to your online store on one of the big auction sites like eBay, Overstock, or Amazon, and earn some eBay affiliate commission at the same time? Registering for your own domain name is a good place to start. This may sound very basic at this point in the online shopping game, but if you haven’t done it yet, what are you waiting for. This is one of those things for small businesses that is easy, probably costs less than your lunch, and can have a real impact on customer perception and even make you some money like paying less for your listing fees.
I am not really talking about registering your own company name, I assume you have already done that if you are serious about your Internet store and marketing your company name. I am talking about not having to use that really long url address that these sites use, and in the process, making it easier for your customers to find you.
Normally when you setup shop, you are using the servers of the company you sign up with. Using eBay as an example, if you have an eBay store site, your url address is going to be something like http://stores.ebay.com/chipseo-marketing. Something hard to just tell someone, also a little less professional looking, and just hard to type in, bookmark, or even remember (especially for your customers).
Having your own domain name changes that. I just randomly picked one from eBay Stores above, so hopefully this store won’t mind a little publicity (they have some great feedback and have obviously been selling on eBay for a long time), but from the screen shot I can count 51 characters in the url not including the http:// part. I tried to do a search on eBay’s store search page for this store (see below) and it didn’t show up under the keywords for essential oils or 02 essential oils so it might be a little difficult to find by just using a keyword search for their products. The issue of getting your proper keywords available so people can search for them is a topic for another post, but getting a good domain name is a start.
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Friday · Popularity: 9% · acquisition, ebay, news, press release
eBay announced today that they are buying Aftebuy, a German auction management company. It has been interesting to watch over the last few years what companies eBay has merged with, purchased, or taken over. One comes to mind, Skype, that really didn’t seem to take hold, but did cost a bundle, something like $2.6 BILLION if I remember right.
Afterbuy is another area of business that I don’t think eBay has ventured into yet. Auction management. There has been news in that area recently (see my previous post Channel Advisor to Acquire Marketworks) when one of the two largest U.S. companies bought the other, making Channel Advisor the auction management company to integrate with eBay. So why is eBay now buying an auction management company? Perhaps the same reason Google bought YouTube, who knows, but I am sure the Channel Advisor users would like to know.
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