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Domain summit 2024

eBay partner network - worth it?

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draggar

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I've been thinking about an eBay affiliate program (we all see them) and is eBay Partner Network (ebaypartnernetwork.com) legit and worth it?

I haven't gone into the program that much - are there any costs associated with it? What is the comission like (and getting paid)?
 
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JB Lions

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It's legit, no cost to join. Get paid every month on time. Commission will vary for each person, you get paid per click.
 

David G

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IMO, not worth using *unless* you get lots of traffic. Most all sites using the eBay Partner Network (which has been downgraded to just a ppc program), and also Amazon.com (product sales) affiliates have low CTRs and earn extremely poor income making it barely worthwhile implementing the code on your site, assuming your site does not get boat loads of traffic.
 

Gerry

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IMO, not worth using *unless* you get lots of traffic. Most all sites using the eBay Partner Network (which has been downgraded to just a ppc program), and also Amazon.com (product sales) affiliates have low CTRs and earn extremely poor income making it barely worthwhile implementing the code on your site, assuming your site does not get boat loads of traffic.
I agree on the ebay statement...look at your site as prime real estate and determine if you want to lease a spot to something that is not producing income.

On the other hand, I have had success with Amazon (when NC residents were allowed to be part of their affiliate network). But, as David mentioned...that was a site that did get lots of traffic.
 

MichaelJ137

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Draggar, Brian a.k.a.TeenDomainer does well with it, shoot him an email.... I know it works ok with product domains and on mini sites.

I asked a similar question two days ago, wrote a whole post and this question was in it, and not one informative answer was posted. A mod posts and people start answering.

Love it.......

Not trying to ruffle anyone's feathers, just taking note of what I see. I posted LEGIT questions too.
 

draggar

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I asked a similar question two days ago, wrote a whole post and this question was in it, and not one informative answer was posted. A mod posts and people start answering.

I also posted this almost 2 months ago - I had almost forgotten about this thread and the program. :)

Right now the site doesn't have a lot of traffic but it's niche would be useless with Amazon - anything related is though 3rd party and doesn't pay too much but there's a good amount on eBay that has to do with the site. I'm assuming the amount I get paid per click is similar to AdSense - pennies unless they buy / bid?
 

Gerry

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Draggar, Brian a.k.a.TeenDomainer does well with it, shoot him an email.... I know it works ok with product domains and on mini sites.

I asked a similar question two days ago, wrote a whole post and this question was in it, and not one informative answer was posted. A mod posts and people start answering.

Love it.......

Not trying to ruffle anyone's feathers, just taking note of what I see. I posted LEGIT questions too.
Being a mod has nothing to do with it. It is having the post seen and not buried back three or four pages.

I log on, briefly scan the new posts, I am sure I intentionally pass over many and unintentionally miss many.

It is that first line and first few words in the Descriptive title that make all the difference.

eBay partner network - worth it?

That right there gets all the attention of anyone slightly interested.
 

JB Lions

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"I asked a similar question two days ago, wrote a whole post and this question was in it, and not one informative answer was posted. A mod posts and people start answering."

I responded because I do affiliate marketing for a living and was checking this section out and this merchant is a top 5 program for me. And you don't need heaps of traffic to make money, you need targetted traffic. So if you're getting traffic for something a merchant with an affiliate program doesn't carry, this might be a good fit. You can mix this in with affiliate links as well and get paid on the clickout. I use it for stuff you can only find on ebay, targetted niche type stuff, so I do well with them.

"I'm assuming the amount I get paid per click is similar to AdSense - pennies unless they buy / bid"

Per click which is based on people buying or winning auctions and new registrations which really help the payout. Comparing them, I'm getting paid about what half Adsense is paying but I'm getting a higher click thru rate since it's more targetted.

So to your question - eBay partner network - worth it?

The only way to know for sure is just to test it out yourself.
 
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sitemaker

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I have many sites where I use the Ebay partner network. For me, it's been worth it. Anytime I build a mini-site just for Adsense income, I now put Ebay widgets on it as well. The return is about the same for both, so the site's revenue doubles. In many cases, this makes the difference between paying the renewal fee and not. (I have a lot of of sites that are low value.)

But Ebay is very different than Adsense. Adsense is transparent and predictable; Google pays per click, and the bid-per-click doesn't change much.

Ebay is opaque and erratic. And it is *not* PPC, despite what the above posts said. It's a weird hybrid that resembles PPC on the surface but amounts to PPA in its net effect.

Ebay claims they are paying you based on the actual value of the clicks you send them, including *all* future actions by the same person. In other words, you get paid more if the clicker isn't already an Ebay customer and enrolls, or if he *wins* the auction, or if he later recruits someone else, or if he puts something on auction himself. You get more if he does a BIN on a high ticket item than a low price item. Etc.

Ebay wraps all this intelligence into a value-per-click that is different for each of your campaigns. With Ebay it's important to create many separate campaigns. Much more important than with Adsense, because the campaigns are NOT just for tracking purposes.

The net effect is that Ebay is more like PPA than PPC. For example: My sites generate a steady predictable 7,000 unique visitors per month, but each campaign will go for several weeks earning 0 or 1-cent per click. Then for about 1 week, all the clicks are worth something good again, and money piles up. Then the clicks are worthless again. This is the behavior for every campaign. 90% of the income seems to be earned in 25% of the time.

Over time, my erratic Ebay income averages the same as Adsense. But you have to use a moving average of about seven weeks to see that.

------------

By the way: The last two links in my current signature (as of this writing) are examples of this. Accordionist dot org and Siddur dot org earn from Ebay about $40 per month each; and SmokeyRobinson dot info and PaintGun dot info (and many other sites like them) just beat their renewal fees while waiting for a sale.
 
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David G

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Anytime I build a mini-site just for Adsense income, I now put Ebay widgets on it as well. The return is about the same for both, so the site's revenue doubles.

Thsnks for the excellent report about eBay network. Interesting how you can increase revenue by having both programs on your sites.

P.S. Your Accordionist.org site is a good one. BTW, I found this on eBay: "On average across eBay Partner Network, publishers make between $0.06 and $0.21 per click sent to eBay. Is that about right in your account?
 

sitemaker

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One more difference:

Adsense always looks like advertising. So even if Google didn't prescribe limits per page, you would degrade your site's quality if you used too much of it.

But Ebay RSS feeds (and widgets and custom API-driven modules) can sometimes be presented as a service of the site: aggregating auctions of interest to the visitor; this is perceived as a site feature rather than advertising.

See for example: http://AntiquePerfumeBottles.info
See also the sites linked to from the bottom of that page. These mini-sites only have two pages each (the home page plus the Pluck Media display page) and take me about one hour to build per site.

Since January 1, AntiquePerfumeBottles.info has earned $11.45 (from Ebay alone, not counting the Adsense, nor the Pluck Media embedded ads). It contains only three Ebay campaigns:

BIN list: 202 views. 19 clicks @ .22 ea.
Auction list: 202 views. 40 clicks @ .14 ea.
Books list: 201 views. 5 clicks @ .37 ea.

(Some of those other mini-sites have up to 6 campaigns. The Siddur.org site has 13 campaigns. Accordionist.org has 10.)

Most campaigns do not get such a high EPC. 2-cents to 9-cents is actually my most common range. Across the whole portfolio -- currently 206 campaigns and growing -- the average is 8-cents.

Besides the perfume bottles, my highest EPCs are from campaigns related to

  • electric lawnmowers
  • sports tickets
  • tools (sanders, paintguns, etc.)
  • playboy memorabilia
  • old cantorial records
  • collectible dolls
But because Ebay is adjusting EPC to effect a PPA model, the EPC may depend as much on the demographics of the site as on the subject matter of the Ebay feed.

Although the EPC averages lower than Adsense, I get a lot more clicks on the Ebay rss feeds than on the Adsense ads. So they balance out.
 
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sitemaker

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I like antiqueperfumebottles.info ... Can you say which program you use to make sites like that in just 1 hour?

I use Dreamweaver most of the time.

The hour is spent:

  • pointing the domain to the webhost
  • provisioning a cpanel there for it
  • copying my last mini-site to the new mini-site's location
  • running Micro Niche Finder to decide what keywords should be in the welcome message on the home page, and to decide the page-titles and meta-tags (description and keywords) for the new site's two pages, to inform my choices of Ebay feeds, and to choose target keywords for the Pluck Media widget.
  • visiting Adsense to add a custom channel for the new site
  • visiting Ebay to create the campaign for each RSS feed, and to fetch the snippets for the RSS feeds
  • visiting Pluck Media to add the new site's URL to my account's list
  • optionally visiting YouTube to find some videos to make the site stickier
  • editing the welcome message to fit the new site
All the choices and information collected above are defined in the site's config file. I just edit the values of the php variables in the site's config file as I go.

This turns the copy of the previous site into my new site. No other files get touched. I change some variables, and ElectricLawnmowers.info turns into YankeeStadiumTickets.info or CivilWarTokens.info or FourTops.info or SkiRacks.info etc. etc.

When I began making sites like these, I was hand-coding them. Over time, I pulled more and more of the varying information out into a config file, away from the static structure. This made it go much faster, and was less prone to introducing syntax errors (typos) in the code.

Apart from my own html/php/css, these sites use the Open Source rss2html script to process the Ebay feeds. You can download it here: http://www.rss2html.com/

The only other tool used above is Micro Niche Finder. If you are a domainer, or a site publisher, or an ad buyer, you can save a lot of research time with MNF. Depending on which role you are in, MNF can help you find cheaper keyword phrases to buy ads for, or find phrases to use in your content for more search engine traffic and higher Adsense EPC, or find domains to buy. It doesn't actually tell you anything that you couldn't find out for yourself eventually, but it saves tons of work doing the research for you. It's one of the best investments I ever made. More info about it is here: trupod.com/MNF-videos/ and a page to buy it is here: trupod.com/MNF-buy/

This thread has morphed from its original topic (evaluating the Ebay Partner Network affiliate program). If we're going to continue in this direction, perhaps we should move the conversation to one of the forums on development?
 
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thebutler

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@Sitemaker , you have very generous with your info. Thanks.

I use Ebay for several sites along with Adsense as sitemaker.

I use Wordpress for the framework. To pull in the auctions I use the phpBay plugin (which you need to buy). I've never used MNF but I know plenty of people do. I do my own keyword research which does take time. I can't knock them out in one hour but as noted once you've figured out the template it is much easier.

And yes the money is low but some people have gone the sitemaker method and are producing plenty of sites to make money.

Overall my EPN is stuck around 13 cents per click but I don't have as many site as Sitemaker. In some niches its the best way to make money.
 
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