There Will Be No Big Christmas for eBay This Year!
On October 1st – Everyone in the eBay affiliate program (ePN) will be compensated using the new QCP – Quality Click Pricing Structure. I have to be honest, I think eBay made a mistake on this one… At least with their timing… right before the Holidays!
When the change was first announced and we were able to see side-by-side comparisons in late August, it was not too promising and many people ended up earning quite a bit less. I was down roughly 1-2% in August earnings, and Sept has trended almost flat on the EPC level, though I made several site changes to increase the EPC factor. (EPC is well up, but I sacrificed 3 higher volume sites and their revenues to do so)
Before I get too far along – I want to say that I DO have a good presence in the ePN system still across several sites. But I have definitely looked at eBay much more closely and even removed sites that were earning good money but hurting overall quality. Its a real kick in the ass when you remove a higher volume site that is earning steady income… simply to try and increase the quality of the crappier sites that aren’t earning as much.
Go figure… it is what it is… and it’s a mess!
Will eBay Regret this Change so Close to the Holidays!
Now that we have almost a full calendar month of side by side stats to look at… I predict a HUGE amount of regret from eBay on the timing of this change, and here’s why:
The Busiest Shopping Season is Coming FAST
No need to really say anything more about that. Christmas is right around the corner! My wife has already started her shopping… and once the wheels of shoppers get into high gear, ALL of these affiliate websites that used to promote eBay listings… well, they are now directing traffic elsewhere.
eBay has partially qualified the QCP change by stating that some of the buyers we refer were already going to buy on ebay, regardless of our website interaction. What they don’t account for however, is that we have now built hundreds of thousands of web pages that are right between eBay and the buyer… and we have the power to direct those buyers where we choose, thus influencing that buying decision.
Like I said, it is what it is… a mess.
Affiliates are Removing eBay Links, Moving to Other Shopping Networks
Just read around affiliate forums – heck, you only need to read at eBays own affiliate forum – there are quite a few people who have spent the last month removing eBay links from their sites! And these are only the ones talking about it… imagine everyone who just moved on?!
Check Alexa ranking – At the time of this post – eBay has a significant drop in traffic for the last week or so… I am only guessing, but its likely related top the mass of affiliates REMOVING links, and it is only going to get FAR worse over the next 30-60 days. eBay should have realized this was the time we should be building momentum for the shopping season, not stifling the growth and creativity of a massive affiliate program.
Edit: Added AuctionBytes Link – Thanks to Jake
Big mistake – big mess…
Whats the best way to help your competition? Encourage HALF OF YOUR SALES FORCE to work for them! On the three sites I moved away, 2 are promoting other affiliate programs, one was reduced to AdSense ads that pay well for that market.
The result is more than $1200/month of my own eBay affiliate income lost. True, that’s only about $24,000 in total eBay sales revenue, but when you compound this by thousands of affiliates doing the same thing… Mess. Big Mess. For myself, I am going to make it up with a different affiliate venue… what is eBay going to do to fill the void?
Affiliates Are LOST in the Shuffle of Irrelevant Metrics and No Goals!
If you tell me: “You will be paid 5% commission on every sale you refer”, I understand that. Very clearly. And I KNOW what I as an affiliate, need to do to make money… refer more buyers. Period. “More buyers = higher earnings”.
With QCP, we truly don’t know WHAT TO DO as affiliates, everything is clouded behind a mask of secret algo’s and the only real goals we have are retroactive goals, showing me what I will earn today, based on yesterdays metrics… and oh, I can’t even see THAT metric until 12-16 hours into the day in my timezone!
When you make it hard to understand HOW we get paid, we will simply take the path of least resistance, and promote what we have a clear understanding of. I was able to discern the issue on the sites I removed… they sent alot of non-immediate buying traffic. On the sites I left in ePN, if they begin going down the same road… they will be removed as well.
The Worse is Yet to Come – Just in Time for the Holiday Shoppers!
The biggest ball is about to drop next week when the new pricing structure goes into place… and many people truly start paying attention to the details. You know who you are… the ones who have yet to do a full comparative analysis of your eBay driven sites, waiting to see how it will work in October.
Get your big-boy pants on… you may be in for a shock!
I am fully aware that not is all doom and gloom with eBay partner network and have several high quality sites delivering traffic and sales. BUT… this was likely the worse time eBay could have chosen to make this change. You simply don’t stir up the entire sales force before the biggest shopping season of the year. The uncertainties of staying will lead them to the next best game in town, where they KNOW what they have in store for them.
How about a simple show of hands… If you have changed even ONE LINK from eBay to a different affiliate program, drop a comment below.
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Dreams, Goals, and Other New Year Stuff! | Happy New Year!
- The New Google… An Early Christmas to Me!
- Quality Click Pricing Comes to ePN for eBay Affiliates
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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.
My current site-building strategy is to build links to Amazon products. Plus, using the ReviewAZON plugin, I can add user comments, which I fully believe is helping with conversion.
The one thing I really like about the Amazon affiliate program is that they have a clear-cut payment structure. With very few exceptions, my earnings go up with the more sales I refer each month. Percentages range from 4% – 8.5% and are performance based. Right now I’m at 6% and need just a few more sales to get to 6.5% for the month.
My earnings at eBay have basically flat-lined. I am currently switching a site over from Datafeedr to eBay, but if that doesn’t work out it will be VERY easy for me to switch it to Amazon.
Ohhhh my, if Amazon would only lengthen that cookie! YUMMY! I’m definitely paying more attention to my other affiliate programs!
Yup…. it’s a mess fo sho!
Jake,
Yes, I, too, wish the Amazon cookie was longer. But, right now my conversion rate is just about 20%, which I think is pretty good. And, about 90% of the purchases are spot-on with my site’s links. In other words, visitors to my site are finding what they want and purchasing those exact items.
On eBay, however, well over half my sales were completely unrelated to my site’s items, and my conversion rates where much lower. So, I’ll take Amazon for now, as they are treating their affiliates well.
more interesting news. It looks like pepperjam will not go to the QCP. They are pausing (essentially dropping) their ebay program as of Oct. 1. If you were using pepperjam, you better get to changing over those links.
Thanks for the info Mark. I have been looking into affiliate programs with e-bay to broaden my customer base. I guess I will have to look a little closer at e-bay or maybe just cruise on over to Amazon as Rochelle noted she is doing fairly well with them.
I keep going back and forth on all this. But you have at least cleared up something for me and that is that it’s difficult to know how much I will be earning in commissions. All this time I thought I was just not understanding it.
I started out using BANS, then phpBay. With the QPC coming up, it has got me worried. I’ve actually been digging through Terapeak’s data to find some juicy niches, but now I’m concerned if I should take the ebay route. The phpZon plugin for Amazon looks pretty interesting and even though the cookie “crumbles” quickly, it still has a structure we all can understand.
You hit the nail on the head about this being REALLY bad timing. Geesh!
I LOVE that they are doing this right before christmas. My earnings should be up 75% to 100% starting october 1 ;)
Seriously, this new change has only shown really really positive numbers in my reports so I’m happy and I’ve heard a handful of others that are up also.
I’ll be adding additional ebay links to my sites.
Sorry to the ones taking a beating but it’s not all bad.
Yep, I’m only getting 0.17 click at ebay, so I’ve switched to adsense at the moment where at least I get $2 click. Will definitely be looking at other options in more detail.
What’s really depressing is seeing one of (what used to be) your high traffic, high earnings sites getting a .01 QCP rate.
I haven’t looked into switching over any of my sites to the Amazon affiliate program – I’m not sure this would work on alot of my sites. Adsense might be the best bet for right now.
Hadn’t really thought about the holiday aspect of the switch – revenge is sweet, huh? ;-)
@ Rochelle –
We have had to get a bit crafty in order to be in the Amazon program – NC residents were discharged from Amazon a few months ago due to a state tax issue.
Gotta love Govt! :-) Glad to hear its working for you also – I have had up and down luck with Amazon, but it has always depended on the market or product.
@ Jake –
The 1-day Amazon cookie is somewhat misleading… You only get credit for what the buyer adds to their cart within 24 hours, but Amazon keeps the cart active for 7 days. So, hypothetically, a visitor could add something today… and not complete the purchase for 6 days, and you would still get comp’ed.
@ Josh – Yup… another distraction for affiliates leading into the holiday season!
@ Mark Sierra – I have a very hard time understanding the triggers that effect pay rate. Going from .14 cpc today to .35 cpc tomorrow, then back to .24 cpc makes no sense to me at all. I realize its based on the previous days earnings… but it seems it should be more static.
Of course, after dropping three high volume sites from the mix, daily clicks are only half of what they used to be as well, so it likely plays into it.
# Affiliate Marketer aka Mark – Like you, I have several that are now doing well… but disappointed over the ones that took a crapper. They were high volume, high $$$ earning sites under the old pay method. ALL have a great following of RSS subscribers and respond well to posts and recommendations.
I have noticed that “Store” type sites seem to do better now as well. Instead of content-content-content-listings-content, the ones that seem to do best are those with simple shopping pages.
Of course – those do very little in search engines though – catch 22 at best!
@ Caro – Same here… higher volume, higher earning site, seem to have the worse outcome on my end.
Mark
Thanks Mark,
I agree and have had to drop at least half of my sties from ebay in order to keep the earnings up due to QPC. It hurts even to remove any sites that are making money no matter how small.
But on the good side my sites with adsense are pulling way ahead and are making up the difference!
I have dropped 3 or 4 sites from the ebay programme inspiteof having good visitor numbers, I cannot understand why they have made their affiliate programme so complicated, it’s almost as bad as Adwords (for me anyway). If Pepperjam has paused the EPN programme that doesn’t bode well. Having said that, at the moment I’m only about 1-3% down on my normal earnings but more by luck than anything else. Good job Mark showed how to do the ebaykeys, at least if it’s a WP site it should be easy to switch over to something else.
This has been a 24hr thing with me. I went and looked back at last years earnings compared with this August and September and things are not good. Same amount of traffic ,but the money just isn’t there. I can’t nail down whats happening.
Personally I have already begun to send traffic away from eBay. Its not one thing that made me do it. Its the simple fact is they have a history of huge mistakes and don’t seem to have a business plan. Arrogant Too. They have disenfranchised everyone I know.
from 50 plus sites I had on ePN I have dropped it to 10. It was easy find other places to send users.
Lots of us watch TV during the day as we type our lives away. If you watch eBay stocks it gos up when they make a change then down again. This is just another thing that makes them suspicious. Do they make these changes to make the stock jump?
Who knows eBay’s motivation, but I think its bad for the company as a whole.
I also predict they have a terrible Christmas. If a little guy like me is cutting back think what the big sites are doing.
There are networks for just about anything on eBay. I have also contacted site owners about them setting up something directly. I have 2 so far who will work with me.
Thanks for another great post Mark!
Did you see this post over at the BANS forum…
Phone call from Ebay Partner Network
I received an interesting phone call this afternoon from an EPN representative. He identified himself, asked me a few questions about my campaigns and my traffic strategy. He clearly had my account information in front of him.
I asked him if there was a problem and he said that there were no problems or issues and that EPN is simply confirming that the provided telephone numbers were legitimate because they seem to have a high number of accounts with non-functional numbers.
He asked me my thoughts on QCP. I told him that I didn’t have an opinion yet, but I was waiting to see how things shook out. He had my current earnings and what it would have been with QCP in front of him. He said that they are very curious too about how well it’s going to ultimately go over. He even went on to say that he doesn’t understand the algorithm at all. I was surprised at how candid he was.
I told him that I was just surprised by the call and immediately assumed that there was a problem with my account. He reiterated that there were no problems. I went on to tell him that sometimes it seems like EPN shoots first and asks questions later. He laughed and said that he has heard that alot lately from the people he calls.
The moral of this story is… make sure the phone number in your EPN account is current.
I only dabbled in EPN for about a year. About 3 months ago I finished some big projects I was working on and started to develop a real site that would have been geared for EPN. I was working night and day writing content and had a good amount of it written. Then we got the notification of the changes with EPN to QPC or whatever the hell it is. I pretty much stopped my development for EPN and am now developing for other affiliate sites. I think the site would probably still work for EPN, but because of thier arrogance I probably won’t promote them.
If eBay wanted to really screw themselves they did a good job. I said it from the beginning. They will lose market share now to Amazon and others. People are not going to put up with the black magic bull algorithms that require a freaking Phd to figure out. And all you have to do is read a few EPN forums and realize the affiliate program is no longer worth pursuing – at least not for people that don’t have a ton of extra time.
Even the thin affiliate sites will cease to exist because there is no chance what-so-ever they will make any money. Even though they are thin they still require a little time to put up. Getting $0 for even a little time doesn’t make sense.
Eventually all the thin affiliate sites will disappear and all the sites that have some decent content will start to disappear because there’s not real money in it for the affiliates anymore.
What happens then? eBay will have to foot the entire advertising budget themselves – while places like Amazon have those thousands and thousands of affiliates that used to promote eBay now promoting them.
Nice going eBay….In future business classes this will be a case study of how to lose market share through stupidity. Somebody at eBay should be fired. And I sincerely hope the eBay idiots are reading these posts and truly realizing what a mistake they made.
I have change more than few links…
what affiliate programs / tools do recommend in place of ebay / phpbay / bans?
I haven’t dropped any eBay links yet. But I’ve added a lot of Amazon, Chitika, AdSense alternatives which, no doubt, will decrease eBay clicks. That’s not to say that I won’t swap out eBay links if, and when, it seems indicated.
I have not deleted any ebay links although my earnings are worse than ever with the new structure. I have, however, stopped building new ebay affiliate sites. From now on I will focus more on information products and adsense.
Solid Namer
All through August and half of September I had clicks ranging from 11 cents to 33 cents per click. Each individual campaign had a value, and all of a sudden all my values for the rest of September all had the same amount each day, and it dropped from 11 cents to 1 cent and then 0 cents. Very scary. I changed the 2 best sites to my husband’s account, and they were right up again.
I really don’t know what to think of all this and I am not a computer expert, so a lot of stuff is above my head.
(First Post-long time follower)
I have Francine’s experience. Despite clicks increasing in last week of September all given 0 EPC – madness.
The new ‘rewards’ will pobably kill my main site as high value items. If I build more I will focus on high bid volume low value and whack them up quick with minimum content to see if they work. If they don’t will work on testing other affiliates and building to their needs. I think eBay’s baffling attitude and changes will have the opposite effect on website quality.
Why didn’t they just have a clear much lower % cut for out of category sales – simple and easy to understand and build for. At the end of the day my experiance is that as a buyer I don’t want a valued user experience when I am in the market to send. I want the item I seek at the best price and bye-bye. The experience should come from the sellers. If eBay spent as much time policing themselves, maybe it would cut out the fraud, poor descriptions and shocking feedback system they have created
Interesting info, Mark. I think you’re right about the whole timing of it — if I were them, I may have waited until January! Than again, maybe the reason they did it now is because they believe it will help them for the holidays. I guess we’ll see.
Yep…Iam totally miffed at Ebay and their changes! I have since ramped up my adsense links and taken down Ebay links.
Oh well so sad!
Hi,
Can anyone tell me if using the Amazon program how their earnings compare with that of ebay?
So far I have not had much success with Amazon.
Randy,
Right now I’m hands down making more money on Amazon than eBay.
BUT
It’s all relative.
Keep in mind that my house was flooded last year and that REALLY hurt my sites. I was focusing on repairing my house and I wasn’t able to do anything on my sites for close to a year. Many of them suffered to the point of death because of my lack of attention.
Right now, I feel like I am basically starting from scratch with my sites. I have three eBay stores left and they are bringing in a trickle of income (right now I think my earnings for Sept are less than $15 – pathetic! I was at several hundreds of dollars each month prior to the flood). I have two Amazon stores, one of which I JUST launched last week. I am only earning from the first store I created, which is less than two months old. I have done almost no promotion on it and it is earning, which I am THRILLED about. But, it has earned less than $100 at this point.
BUT
I know the potential exists. And, if I start to promote this site I can only imagine how well it will do.
I like to check my stats in StatCounter (to see where traffic comes from) and have noticed that many of the pages from this site are actually at the #1 spot in Google for various keywords. In many cases, these pages are right above Amazon’s site for those keywords.
Rochelle
Randy,
Ack! Sorry, I meant to add the following.
While I’m not going to share what my Amazon site is that is doing well, I will say that you can build a site on things you never really thought about. This particular site isn’t one that I would have EVER thought about building. My 9-year-old daughter came up with the niche because she really wanted her own site. I built it to appease her, not expecting anything from it. It has proved to me that a site doesn’t have to be about Wiis, iPods, digital cameras, etc. to do well.
Hopefully, that makes sense.
Rochelle
@ Rochelle –
I can attest to that myself, not with Amazon of course, but through other programs, or even with direct relationships to other websites.
You surely dont have to reach for the stars… and a site that generates just a few sales a day of an awkward, non-popular niche, will pay for itself very quickly.
Mark
Mark,
Agree completely…but haven’t removed a single link. I am not much of a chicken little and my earnings were down month 1 and up month 2 for a net wash.
People naturally resist change and much of the squawking about the horrible injustices heaped upon them is being done by people making next to nothing on Ebay anyways yet they still bellyache like you just stole their first born child or something.
Nothing produces like Ebay….and until that changes I am going to figure them out and work through it. They might be the devil but the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.
My 2 cents.
@ The Other Bill –
Agree completely. eBay is the ONLY game in town for one of my primary markets – unfortunately, it is also one of the markets I had to pull for now, so I could learn WHAT was causing overall network low quality.
When August 17th rolled around and we were able to see the old versus the new in a side by side, I was able to instantly identify 3 sites that needed to be changed.
“ALOT of clicks, Moderate Sales, BUT… ALOT of unrelated sales!”
For myself, I NEEDED to learn how removing these sites would influence the overall quality of the entire network.
I managed to close August at an overall network EPC of just .11 cents. By removing only those three sites, Sept is at an overall network EPC of .28 cents.
I DID take a pretty good earnings hit in Sept, but in the end, I think it will be worth it, to remodel the sites to promote a higher EPC, and thus not kill ALL accounts with just a few bad sheeplets.
Mark
Hey Mark!
There have been couple of times I have seen him analyzing current situation for more detailed future interpretations before.
He was right back then. He is right, now.
Just that this ain’t good news for the rest of readers.
Common, Mark!
Your efforts are certainly visible. But would you share a bit of your plan, so the rest of readers can strategize better?
I had Hostgator’s newsletter in my email this morning. Usually just skim through it but today something caught my eye. What about using dropshipping and by passing eBay? I see that they recommend Doba.com.
Your thoughts?
I’m sure this is an anomoly – the exception rather than the rule – but looking at the new versus the old I will make more than twice as much with QCP. I don’t understand it well enough to know why but I hope it is accurate and continues.
I noticed today that Pepperjam is upset enough with the new QCP system to quit.
@Mark…the .28cent EPC is cool but if your clicks dropped significantly then I would suspect that the net effect on earnings was close to flat line?
Driving the EPC up is great, but if income doesn’t follow then who cares.
Make sense?
Not removing any ebay links, but spending my efforts elsewhere as far as promotion. I am also stopping all my PPC campaigns that were promoting BANS or WP sites to ebay. I was able to come out ahead with PPC, but now unless I can get clicks from Adwords for less than .01, there’s no point.
I worked long and hard building some pretty good ebay based sites, but for me the bottom has dropped out of it. Don’t get me wrong, they are still bringing in a few bucks, but the effort involved to get those few dollars just isn’t worth it. I can make 3 times as much promoting affiliate products on sites that take me a tenth of the time and a fraction of the cost to that of building a bans site. Sure, I may leave some ebay product on a back page in a blog of two, and if it brings a couple of bucks in great, if it doesn’t then no big shakes, But the days of building dedicated ebay sites are well and truly over!
I think that the sheer uncertainty of EPN payments will drive most affiliates away. I only do it part time but was hoping to make it full time, that now seems unlikely with EPN. Fortunately my sites are well served by other affiliate programs Amazon and Walmart amongst them. If you are a full time EPN affiliate I think its time to prepare to jump ship.
I’m moving links away slowly, worst epc sites first but will probably go all the way.
@ All -
Just to be completely fair – todays final stats from the Month of September ending up closing at a higher rate than under the current system.
In other words – I earned MORE under the new system than I would have with the old pay system.
That said – I DID have to drop a few of the sites that were hurting my overall quality, and throughout the next 2-3 months, I will see if I can slowly integrate them back in using different sale-page techniques than I had previously done, to send more BUYERS versus shoppers.
I already have a few good ideas in my head and once they are integrated, I will post them here so we can all track this together.
In the end – I just think the sites need to be the right demographics for ePN.
M
It doesn’t sound like it will be a Merry Christmas at all with news like this. My already low earnings will be lower, ouch. Thanks for the post.
- Adam
A lively thread this one which is only to be expected. My own earnings based on QCP are actually about 25% higher so you’d think I’d be excited but I’m not.
The lack of transparency and ability to explain the new magical algo are not the way any business wishing to build a trusting relationship with it’s advertisers/promoters should go.
Hiding behind a wall of secrecy enables the algo to be manipulated with a gradual downward pressure on revenue share it would be hard to pick up and not something that could easily be proved.
As you said Mark, we control the traffic and in many cases can choose to send that traffic elsewhere. I have a couple of sites with a low epc that still make several thousand dollars per year.
QCP suggests eBay doesn’t want that traffic which is a mystery to me. All I want is to paid an understandable percentage of an items sale price whenever a sale is made.
Does it real matter that a smaller percentage of visitors buy? If nobody comes to your store you sell nothing. I’d rather make a sale to 1 in 500 than to no one at all. Especially if I have 10,000 visitors a day looking at my stock. Who knows, they may just come back and buy something another day.
Despite my apparently increased wealth I still think it is a poor decision. It seems more and more businesses want to become less transparent, especially online, and that can’t be a good thing for anyone in the long term.
So I just had my first day of real data. What’s really disappointing is to get paid nothing for sales that have been made today because I was given a QCP of 0 for that site yesterday. That just isn’t right. eBay got paid from my traffic and I didn’t.
On the flip side I got paid on several sites that made no sales in the last week but have a decent QCP. Now that’s great I got paid and eBay didn’t.
It’s really quite bizarre.
Tossing 3,200 links. I grow tired of the Ebay daily mystery of what’s it all about Alfie syndrome. Haven’t got the patience to see what the next “improvement” will be….
@Mark—-well after two days of evaluation on the new program, I have officially removed a LOT of ebay links.
I have a tirekicker site that produces lots of clicks but no revenue and it posted .01 cent two days in a row. I can get .10 to .12 cents on Adsense so it’s official….I killed the links….slathered it with adsense and away we go.
I am going to evaluate the estimated CPC for the main keywords on each site and compare to what Ebay is paying….if it makes sense to convert them then I will. If not then I will leave it as is.
Hi Mark,
I have yet to remove any links from my sites, all so far are out performing under the old system but I do have a feeling that may change as the months go on and I will most likely have to do some juggling.
Like Rochelle (Hi, Rochelle) I am doing quite a lot of site work with Amazon at the moment and although the 24 hour cookie isn’t ideal, if your site gives your customer the information they need to drive them to buy then the cookie length doesn’t mean anything. At least this is what I am finding anyway.
Ben
How are you guys removing your ebay niche sites ?
I thought there was no way to do this as Ebay tracks all data for all sites created.
That’s a huge loss for all the affiliates. The timing as you have said is also going to have a big impact. Its really surprising how does such a big concern do such a drastic change without considering the cause of the affiliates, it seems Ebay is least concerned about the affiliates. So now its high time for the affiliates to show their power. Thanks for keeping me updated with such a big and important news.
I not sure in the end how I will like EPN but so far my converted sites are performing better than when they were with Pepperjam.
I can only hope the good results keep going.
I am converting my Ebay sites to other programs like Overstock and Amazon. The sites I build with BANS will be removed and replaced with WordPress, which is more versatile anyway, should Amazon ever switch to QPC, LOL! This is just another lesson for all of us. Let’s just move on!
In my comment above dated 2 October I stated I was looking forward to QCP as during the 6 weeks that preview data was available I was consistently 30% up on earnings.
Reality has not quite proved so, well, rewarding. With just over a week worths of data available I am now 30% down on earnings. I even have a site that would have made more than £100 under the old system with a QCP of 0 and no earnings.
That’s right eBay have paid me nothing for making them money. How’s that for a kick between the legs. I don’t know about eBays Christmas but I’m thinking of canceling mine.
Mark,
Any chance you will share with us how to hard-code our WP themes with the code from plugins such as phpBay Pro or phpZon?
If you already did, my apologies, as I can’t find it.
Rochelle
@ Rochelle –
I do have the process in my scheduled posts section at the n1way guide site – but I haven’t found any time to get it done yet.
Head over to this post at the N1Way Guide site – it is a walkthrough of using the Arthemia theme and I have incorporated the functions into the theme, include file.
As you go through the comments, you will see that there is a second “post-listings.php” file linked.
You should be able to see how the file is called into the themes “single.php” file through the include-file code, then how the file uses custom fields to pull in the actual listings.
M
Mark,
Thanks for the link : )
Rochelle
I have to say I am very disappointed with the early results of QPC. My earning look nothing like they did when presented in last months comparison. On one sale of $48.56 I got .06. Thats robbery. I also think there may be something else going on. One of my best sites was getting nearly 200 unique hits a day. So far through Oct 12 it was showing only 118 hits. I checked hostgator and is showed 5 times as many hits. Do you think there is something sinister going on?
Re the post_listings.php file, if we want to incorporate the phpzon code do we just copy the code that’s already in there, below it and substitue the phpbay coding for the phpzon?
thanks
FYI, as of today, Ebay’s visitor numbers are up 6.6% over 3 months and the 1 month average s up 2.148%.
I bet they did it now because they knew people would start coming to their site to buy for Christmas regardless of affiliates.
For the first week of QCP, my earnings were at 50% of what I made the previous months. After nearly 3 weeks, I’m at 90% of what I earned last month. I purchased a few long tail, low volume sites and added them to EPN on the 9th. My EPC dropped tremendously when I did that.
I’m considering dropping all of the low click sites and focusing on building the higher volume, slightly higher EPC sites. One in particular could be switched to Amazon fairly easily, so if things don’t work out with Ebay, I’ll be ready to switch.
@ Atomm –
Just for kicks – drop in Amazon.com into the compare screen and change the view to 6 months. You can clearly see the shopping season picking up at Amazon, where eBay is flat, or actually declined beginning in August.
There is a slight rise over the past week or so…
My experience has been just opposite on adding new sites! They generally begin with higher ePC (.19-.23 epc) than my overall average of .17 epc. Up to about the 30-50 click mark, then they begin leveling off.
M
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y09/m10/i19/s01
@ Jake –
Good find! I added it to the post as well!
Mark
[...] in the exact process and learn the best way to use Terapeak for eBay Research! Well… since ePN kinda turned the tables on many affiliates, I walked away from RankSpankers, and decided there would not be enough demand [...]
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