Change at ePN Leaves Your Sites Useless – Again!
As if eBay Partner Network hasn’t pissed in the Wheaties of enough affiliates in the past 6 months – On Tuesday, they decided to change the way the ebay RSS link structure works… effective immediately! This is probably the reason BANS went down last week, and guess what… if you are heavy with phpbay sites, yours may not work now either! What ever happened to telling people a few weeks in advance of an upcoming change? How about the people with thousands of individual pages to fix?
Don’t you just love the “Partnership” and “Communication” aspect of this all? I mean, how many affiliates sent hundreds of thousands of clicks yesterday… and won’t be paid!? Maybe that’s the plan though… think about it… making a change that eliminates $50,000 a day in affiliate revenue, damn… one of the talking heads might even get a bonus & a pat on the back for that cost-saving measure! (sarcasm included)
Fortunately, Wade was all over this when people started noticing their links not working right… and released a fix that is linked below.
The Fix from Wade at phpBayPro
To bring your site into compliance – you will need to update only one file, thankfully. Head over to the forums and read the fix from Wade himself.
The big question…is just How Much more are affiliates going to take from eBay before they call it quits and leave eBay holding this award winning affiliate plan, with nobody to play in it! Oh… and don’t think they are only changing for affiliates, there is a HUGE change coming for sellers in a couple weeks also…
Maybe another award is due – for pissing off most of your users, sellers, and affiliates, that helped build the giant into what it is today!
Edit – It looks like the majority of the change effects mostly Non-USA sites right now. At least that’s what I read… and a big thanks to Cherie who runs an awesome Salmon Recipe site for pointing me to the changes! Guess that hsows how disconnected I am from ePN lately!
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Change the Default Build a Niche Store Link
- Change the Default eBay listing logo to Promote Sign-Ups!
- Don’t Use Adsense on BANS Sites
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
Yep, just another example of how ePN don’t give a crap about any of their affiliates. Their attitude is… “you should all roll over and do whatever we want…we are the ALL POWERFUL ePN”… yea right!.
Communication from ePN always has been, and I think always will be a huge problem. Takes them around 10-20 days to repond to emails, they don’t communication major changes to their affiliates and never public blog comments. I think ePN forget that they need us and not the other way around.
Sorry Mark, rant over.
@Ben Johnson – I hear ya for sure Ben. Just for shits and giggles… I recently compared my affiliate stats at ebay.
January 2007 – I sent more than 22,000 visitors to ebay products!
January 2008 – +51,000 referred
January 2009 – +43,000 referred
January 2010 – +3200 referred
Obviously – I still have some residual links on pages out there.
Not a drop in the bucket to them I’m sure… but I can sleep better at night knowing I am doing right by my own self!
I’m not giggling quite so much myself. I send 200,000 visitors per month and thats a lot of websites to update. This might be a stupid question but is there any visible means by which you can tell your links are not being tracked?
Hi Mark,
I am not registered with phpbay forum and cannot get to that post. Is there any way you could post the fix or send via email?
Thanks,
Doug
@Mike – Not a clue Mike… it looks on the ePN forums like people just noticed the difference in their own metrics, to those being reported at eBay.
I hear ya on the no-laughing-matter… but on the same token, its good to be more diverse instead of tied primarily into ebay.
M
@Mark Hansen – I’m working on it but it will take a while.
@Doug – I wish I could man… but I’m afraid it would not be good for my relationship with Wade. :-)
Regging at the forum only takes a minute and all you need are your email address and license info. Its just a closed bbforum.
@Mike – Most definitely… a year or more! I am just now revisiting a fairly busy site and converting the deeper and more popular pages.
Thanks for this info. Do BANS sites also need fixing and, if so, is there a fix available?
So what are your top 5 alternatives to ebay?
@megaw – How about 10 Alternatives to ePN from many months ago… I am LOVING the Amazon program!
@Polly – Not sure Polly.. I have no BANS sites to check! I think it was fixed last week though. soggy dave may know.
@Mark – Thanks, I’ll post a comment on Soggy Dave’s blog.
I’m beginning to think that it’s time to convert my successful BANS sites to WP/phpbay. I’m not looking forward to this, but am glad that I’ve found your articles on the subject and this one in particular – http://www.thenichestorebuilder.com/converting-from-bans-to-phpbay-method-2.htm – which I need to study carefully.
Hey Mark,
I totally here ya! I spent a nice part of yesterday frantically uploading my auction.php to make sure my sites didn’t’ feel the hit. It’s good to know it was limited to non-us. — I updated all sites anyway. What a pain!
And yes, I’m slowly building a nice collection of Amazon sites which is turning out to be a nice extra stream!!
Thanks bud!
Mark,
Just a quick note to tell you that I LOVE your graphic for this post!!
Rochelle
As a former Ebay seller who has gone through so many of their “fixes”, I would not trust them as far as I could throw a 2 ton weight. They are non-transparent, arrogant and don’t have a clue about good business practices. I will never, knowingly, have anything to do with any business they are connected to or involved with.
Let’s be honest, eBay EPN hates us! They suck, they’re so mediocre… Everybody, Welcome to Amazon…!
What a bunch of A-holes at epn. I’m away and can’t fix any of my epn sites for two weeks. Argggggggg
@Doug –
I just redownloaded the phpbay software and then too the auctions.php file and reloaded on all my sites that uses phpbay… I could not get on the forum to get the fix by itself.. hope this helps you…
Ditto on loving the graphic. It’s excellent.
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