Originally Posted By Steve McGrath@Ryan –

It’s up to you to decide but how much money are you going to loose by waiting for them to answer you?

It’s Google that did cracked down on many applications by deindexing the sites not EPN.

It’s great that you have 30K/day visitors but that’s worth nothing if your EPC is $0.00/click for your site because people don’t buy stuff and mainly just browse. I have a movie site since 2006 and it happened to me when a certain related movie got out last year. I had lot’s of clicks(no buy) thus I made more money the first day but got that site and my others sites penalized by EPN because of that single site the following days. Now, it’s okay(normal traffic on that movie site now).

You need a site(ebay auctions) that will convert browsers to buyers and with that traffic, it should not be hard being already targeted. In fact, I’m sure if you would get 300 clicks/day or 1% of your traffic at $0.25/clicks(buyers) thus easy for you to get. That’s $75/day or $27375/year in passive EPN money. Your traffic would come from your main site thus even if Google penalize your site, your would still have traffic to it plus Bing/Yahoo traffic.

Think of it of bringing real potential buyers to eBay. Just promote more rare or specialized auctions from your site to that new EPN site.

But if they make an exception for you, they will get “flak”(?) for it thus their current stand. Imagine an HarriePutter.com site. Mmmmm? ;)

Think outside of the box for the now but if you do get an answer in your favor, you would just redirect your traffic to the main site(subdomain EPN store).

That doesn’t make any sense to me at all. I’m not looking to build an ebay site that promotes ebay auctions. I have the most valuable thing of all which is a natural website that already promotes ebay auctions because it’s the nature of how a fansite like Seibertron.com works. I’m not in this to create more work for me to do something I’m not interested in. I’ve already got a website where people post their ebay auctions, etc. I just want to have an affiliate account so that the links can become affiliate links and I can focus more on promoting the existing auctions that are already posted on my site. More people will be apt to click on a link from my website and buy something than they would from a website that’s built purely to promote ebay auctions (the very thing that EPN is trying to prevent).

Seibertron.com fits the author of this article about what you should do exactly. My website is a great resource for visitors in the niche topic of Transformers and eBay items simply compliment my website, not make it.

Don’t Build a YourBay Website!

With the integration of Build a Niche Store and plugins like phpBay, it’s very easy to build a clone of eBay. This is NOT what ePN (or search engines) want to see when they visit a prospective partner site! Your site should be a good resource for visitors in your niche topic and again, the eBay items should simply compliment your site, not make it!

eBay listings should be just like Salt and pepper on your meal! Sprinkle just enough here and there to compliment the flavor of your food!

I also have an account rep assigned to my domain from Google so I’m sure I can work with them to make sure that my site is not penalized by promoting eBay through their affiliate program.

It’s up to you to decide but how much money are you going to loose by waiting for them to answer you?

It’s Google that did cracked down on many applications by deindexing the sites not EPN.

It’s great that you have 30K/day visitors but that’s worth nothing if your EPC is $0.00/click for your site because people don’t buy stuff and mainly just browse. I have a movie site since 2006 and it happened to me when a certain related movie got out last year. I had lot’s of clicks(no buy) thus I made more money the first day but got that site and my others sites penalized by EPN because of that single site the following days. Now, it’s okay(normal traffic on that movie site now).

You need a site(ebay auctions) that will convert browsers to buyers and with that traffic, it should not be hard being already targeted. In fact, I’m sure if you would get 300 clicks/day or 1% of your traffic at $0.25/clicks(buyers) thus easy for you to get. That’s $75/day or $27375/year in passive EPN money. Your traffic would come from your main site thus even if Google penalize your site, your would still have traffic to it plus Bing/Yahoo traffic.

Think of it of bringing real potential buyers to eBay. Just promote more rare or specialized auctions from your site to that new EPN site.

But if they make an exception for you, they will get “flak”(?) for it thus their current stand. Imagine an HarriePutter.com site. Mmmmm? ;)

Think outside of the box for the now but if you do get an answer in your favor, you would just redirect your traffic to the main site(subdomain EPN store).

Originally Posted By Steve McGrath@Ryan –

“Cybertron is a fictional planet(wikipedia” or should I say â��Seibertronâ�� ;)

Maybe it’s too close thus they included sounding name too? I can’t say but why not asked them the real reason? It might take you a while to get an answer from them.

Or just create a sister store site to promote eBay products thus making much easier for you to get in the EPN with that site to sell related products. Anyway, the targeted visitors will more likely go there to “buy” than to browse for items. Just an alternative for you to consider ;)

“Seibertron” is the “engrish” spelling of how the Japanese pronounce the Transformers home planet “Cybertron” (The heroic Autobots are called Cybertrons in Japan, who come from the planet Seibertron). I’ve owned the site for just about 10 years now. Hasbro, the company that owns Transformers, is well aware of my website and we’ve worked together on many occasions.

I’ve sent several communications to EPN regarding this but have only received automated responses so far. I even tried the “live” chat on eBay which is anything but “live” and is entirely 100% automated messages – but it’s extremely clever programming that it had me fooled for the first 5 or 10 minutes. I couldn’t believe that eBay, a company that I absolutely love and think is an amazing company, has such incredibly poor customer service. So I’ve turned to other avenues trying to find out why my site won’t get approved.

As for creating another website to do eBay links, I think that misses the point and is exactly why EPN has cracked down on applications from what I understand. I don’t want to create a separate site to promote ebay auctions. We’ve already got a massive site that does hundreds of thousands of pageviews per day, is ranked in the top 40,000 on sites on Alexa, and has about 30,000 visitors per day who visit my site for the latest Transformers news, galleries and to participate on the very active message board on my site. The site’s staff and users create our own content on a daily basis that has tons of links back to eBay … which we’ve been doing since day 1, just because of all of the great auctions and prototypes that show up on eBay.

Can’t help but think that eBay’s already getting enough traffic from us so why pay us?

Originally Posted By RyanAny suggestions on why my Transformers website keeps getting denied by the eBay Affiliate Network? Seems like this would be a no-brainer.

Are they really accepting any new accounts?

But also you could keep applying forever and never get accepted because of the data validation problem another poster pointed out. If some element of your submission is wrong, say your address or telephone are wrong by one letter, you will get rejected. But you won’t know why and since you cannot access your own data you will never have the opportunity to check its validity and see if that is why you are getting rejected.

It depends where you are, but in some countries you have an absolute right to see what data they hold about you, so you might want to find out what rights you have, then ask them to let you see your own data. And find out what quality controls or complaints procedures they offer, and use them where appropriate.

The fact they do not want to get a basic data validation procedure right does not seem encouraging. Why do they still encourage people to apply?

“Cybertron is a fictional planet(wikipedia” or should I say “Seibertron” ;)

Maybe it’s too close thus they included sounding name too? I can’t say but why not asked them the real reason? It might take you a while to get an answer from them.

Or just create a sister store site to promote eBay products thus making much easier for you to get in the EPN with that site to sell related products. Anyway, the targeted visitors will more likely go there to “buy” than to browse for items. Just an alternative for you to consider ;)

http://www.seibertron.com/

Originally Posted By Steve McGrath@Ryan –
You can’t use copyrighted names/words in a domain name anymore. That’s a new rule from last year and the reason I think you are being denied.

“Seibertron” is definitely not copyrighted, unless they’re breaking apart the domain name and denying it because of the Tron series of movies, which wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense because then a lot of domains would be excluded … especially since “tron” means a whole lot of things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron which has been in use often as a suffix or a stand alone word long before the Tron films came out.

All aside – great resource, and don’t see why they would even second look at this site – nothing wrong in my eyes!

If all else fails – hit the ePN forum and ask for a “Pink” (eBay employee) to review it.

http://forums.ebay.com/db2/forum/Ebay-Partner-Network/1000000047

Mark

Thanks for sharing this info here.

It’s hard to get quality information like this especially to someone new like me who wants to join the eBay Affiliate Program but don’t know where to start.

Thanks a bunch!