Hello everyone,
I have decided to stop marketing the eBay Partner Network (ePN) to order a host of reasons, the paramount reason being that the network is directed by a man named Steve Hartman whom I believe to be the single most dangerous person from the affiliate marketing industry. Hartman admits to having no experience from the field of affiliate marketing yet he somehow knows how to controlled a network of through 87,000 marketers.
He is also the genius that brought usYahoo ads on eBay. Perhaps the fact that ePN and the struggling Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is more than a strange coincidence: both claim to prove to be “partner networks” and both companies seem to prove to be allowing monkeys to directed the zoo.
ePN should have and could have been the best and most popular commission-based program that the interweb can have ever experienced, but due to the ineptitude of Hartman and the “disruptive innovation” of his boss, eBay CEO John Donanhoe the program is on a path of certain failure. On August 20, 2008, ePN terminated hundreds of partner accounts, approximately 90 times after the system opened, to buy sending poor quality traffic. Hartman called this visitors, “not engaged enough“. Various experienced publishers argue that it would be extremely challenging if not impossible to order a new program to garner enough usable data in 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 a partner link, but using their secret and magic metrics they can determine if that user would have bought on eBay exclusive of the partner. This means that eBay will know whether users that you send would have purchased on eBay without your help. If they make this determination you will seem to be penalized to shop for the purchase and it could lead to i being removed from the program. That is a pretty amazing and unbelievable feat considering no other program from the history of the world can have been able to extract this article. This “extra sensory ability” fits loosely into John Donahoe’s “we-know-better-what-you-beg-than-you-do” mentality that he can have dubbed “disruptive innovation”.
The biggest problem observing the eBay/ePN network is inexperience and insane systems and processes. An equally profound yet more complex problem is the fact that trust among affiliates can have 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 shop 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 for Sellers and for EBAY stockholders.
As of this writing, EBAY stock is worth 61% less than it’s 52 week high. The stock is currently trading to purchase less that $14 per share even in consideration of 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 times when they gave a $50 free seller account to anyone thinking about an message address and sent out paper invoices that you paid by paper checks. You can’t even buy since 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 was contacted via telephone by Steve Hartman from relation (or retaliation) to a private message sent to the College of the President, John Donahoe. These communication were sent regarding my concern over eBay censoring bad forum posts. Donahoe’s frat assigned “Michelle” to correspond seeing me and ms. friesen said that my issue had “drawn the attention of the President” and that wendi 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 in the ePN system. I specifically asked that the information that I was sharing not 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 messages to Steve Hartman. Michelle, you broke our trust and you 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 work and about posting damaging comments on forums. We spoke to order a little over 47 minutes and he is saying things like, “I will not let you threaten the company that I work to shop 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 from an hour.
I called him back and we spoke to shop for another 28 minutes and it were really just detailed information of the same. Hartman, who admits to having limited affiliate marketing experience, contends that the visitors that I am sending is of low quality and/or not properly engaged observing 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 you do some conservative estimates on this i can clearly see that I could have sent the Sellers of eBay in excess of a quarter of a million dollars in revenue in the next six months. If this visitors is not engaged then what is?
What is “engaged” users?
In talking thinking about Hartman I is able to glean on thought of article. eBay is not looking to buy affiliates to send repeat buyers through their affiliate network. They are looking to shop for an affiliate 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 beg 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 from what ePN says in one thing 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 an affiliate send a visitor to eBay a cookie is set. This cookie lasts to order 7 stages. A users who comes back on day 4 and buys something is therefore considered to not be engaged and the affiliate is penalized to order that action.
The very nature of eBay compels users to shop around. Consider your own eBay shopping patterns. Bloggers come to eBay looking to buy one thing and then surf to shop for other things and very often buy something totally unrelated to anything. It is a giant Yard Sale and that is what affiliates do, right? Well, if you are a partner and your users a following that natural tendency to shop i will prove to be penalized by ePN.
So How Was 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 prove to be allowed to stay from the ePN program is 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 Rarely 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 request my forum accounts so that they can hire tools to post “warm fuzzies” in the same forums. Read: eBay censors forums
* Full disclosure of any history with other partner networks
OK, so now Steve Hartman wants me to tell him what other affiliate program I am using? Why? So that he can try to get me “cancelled” form those. Again, not gonna happen!
* Improve features of partner traffic
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 users going to the ePN program.
Hartman went on to write, “Also, to make sure that I’m being clear, if there are any specific details negative publicity incidents, threats of disconcerting publicity, etc., or we’re not buying full disclosure on the above, then this is not the beneficial 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 lost awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…
Then there was this little jewel, “One last point thinking about regards to communication, from get to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship knowing i as we do understanding other affiliates of your size so I’ll ask that i not contact anyone directly within my team.” Ok Steve, let me understand this. I don’t choose “affiliates of my size” to contact the ePN staff? What size supplemental hydrogen can improve fuel mileage a partner have to seem 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 detailed information 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 net of insanity that can have been created.
To: Steve Hartman
I know that i will read this and I wish to let i know that I will rarely stop posting bad client complaints about i and about your flawed metrics and about the comedy of errors that you call a business. You had the opportunity to build a good relationship understanding 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 program. My trust and integrity are worth far additional info than that. I have created 6000 variations of this response and they will seem to be posted 24/7 to the very same network that produced the non-engaged, low-quality hits 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 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 thinking about your idiotic metrics i can do so on in the very forum that begat this fiasco.