I have no idea, I have been using BANS for less than 2 months, I have 13 stores that are generating peanuts but I know they will make more, but I am having second thoughts about launching another 10-20 BANS sites in the next couple months now…

I have relevant content. I just added blurbs on the home page about being “teamed up with ebay” so they will hopefully know they will be clicking over to ebay. Plus I added the ebay logo on my auction pages.

I hope this cuts down on the tire kickers that click on a link by just bounce off ebay as soon as they get there.

What would be great is if there was a way for BANS to display the auction description details so people would have more info than just a link title which many time is just bad by the seller.

This way if they had more info on our site, they would be clicking over with the intention to buy. In theory anyway.

Glad you were reinstated … but sorry you had to go through that. The folks at ePN clearly have a hair trigger these days. They are catching plenty of innocents in these massive actions. Everyone should assume they will get a manual review at any moment.

@ Bill

Agreed. Beware the dark side.

@ Elijah

I hate for me to be the catalyst of anyone dropping ePN. Keep in mind I was reinstated. Diversification is the key, as always. All the eggs in one basket and all that…

here is the email I got from them, I use only SEO and viral marketing to advertise my sites, I give away books in the market my sites are about with links to that bans site. I don’t have a clue what a non bona fide transaction is.

We have identified your account to be generating non-bona fide transactions. This violates our Code of Conduct and breaches the agreement between us. Your account will be terminated immediately, and your payment will be placed on hold. Please reply to eBayPartnerNetwork-Quality@ebay.com within 72 hours with a detailed explanation of how you are driving traffic to eBay, including information on any third party agents that you are currently employing. Following the completion of our investigation, any payment will be made as per the Network Agreement. You are not allowed to rejoin the eBay Partner Network.

I sent them a reply and 7 days later I got this from them.

Thank you for contacting us. Your account was put on hold as it was recently linked to some suspicious bidding activity. After reviewing your case and the information you have provided below, we have reinstated your publisher account, and you will receive your July commissions as a credit during the next payment cycle. We value your participation in the program, and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Regards,

The eBay Partner Network Quality Team

How would I have anything to do with suspicious bidding activity.

I don’t have a warm and fuzzy feeling for ebay anymore.

I will stay with ebay because it creates a nice increment to my internet income. But it is only one of a dozen ways that I make money. All of the people who consistantly make money on the web tell you to diversify, diversify, diversify. I feel that is the key.

Warning: I think this guy is pretty funny, but he can be dirty and many people will be offended. If you think that includes you, just read the excerpt below.

Here’s the link: nickycakes. com/recent-industry-drama/

Here’s the lawsuit: courthousenews. com/2008/08/26/eBay.pdf

(take out the space in “. com” to go to the links. I didn’t want to trip Mark’s filter while he is on vacation)

Here’s the gist:

Shawn Hogan, owner of Digital Point, and cohorts are being sued by eEay. The ebay lawsuit document details a lot of very interesting methods for cookie stuffing that shawn + friends were [allegedly] using. Basically how cookie stuffing works is, if you are part of the ebay affiliate program, and you run a high traffic website, you can leave ebay cookies on visitors computers which will give you a cut of any transactions they do on ebay within the next 30 days or so. Stuff enough peoples computers with said cookies and you stand to make a signficant amount of cash based on sheer volume.

Shawn + friends [allegedly] had a system set up that would record each individual computer they had stuffed in order to not attempt to stuff cookies on that same computer again and make things look more legit on ebay’s side in the logs. Also, they attempted to geotarget the traffic and prevent any computers located in Santa Barbara, CA (headquarters of Commission Junction, who hosted ebay’s affiliate program at the time) and San Jose, CA (ebay’s headquarters). This was done to hide the cookie stuffing from ebay and CJ employees.

I’m convinced that people sit around these big companies all day and draw numbers to see who their slapping today.

They don’t seem to care whether they are really right or not and if your business goes down the drain. I think they just like the power of being able to do it and get away with it.

Google pegged my garden site as a bad place and gave a warning in all my listing. Why? Because I had Kontera ads on my site.

Stuff like that almost puts me over the edge.

It took me more than a month to get them to take that notice off my listing and I even had to remove Kontera from my site before they would do it.