EBay Partner Network ePN Changes To Value Based Payout Tiers
August 1st, 2008 | by admin |So it looks like ePN Ebays Affiliate Partner Network is changing again. In a Email from ePN August 1, 2008 ePN announced that payouts for ARCU’s will be $50.00 for new users and that the new payouts will only be for users that signed up on or after 8/1/08. They went on to say that existing users will be brought into the higher payout tier in a couple months.
eBay / ePN is trying to bring high quality traffic to eBay. If you read the ePN message board you will find many threads from users who have been banned for low quality traffic. Most of these affiliates even broke terms of service contract or had links coming from low quality sites such as porn sites. Since nor the banned users or eBay tell us exactly what the issue’s where with the site some ePN message board users claimed to have found the sites and researched them. There findings according to them is the sites had inbound links coming from porn sites or very low quality web sites.
Here’s the highlights of the ePN Email.
“As part of our ongoing effort to reward our best marketing partners and promote trusted commerce on eBay, we are implementing a new pricing structure for Active Confirmed Registered User (ACRU) compensation. The new pricing scheme is based on quality, instead of just volume, and will reward top publishers with up to $50 per ACRU driven to eBay.
Starting today, August 1st, new publishers that join the eBay Partner Network will be placed in this new quality-based pricing structure for the US program.
All publishers that joined eBay Partner Network before August 1st will remain in the existing pricing tiers for a few more months so you can have time to look at the data and see how the change will affect you. As of November 1st, all publishers will be placed in the value based pricing structure for ACRUs.
Here’s how it will work. Each publisher will be placed in a quality tier at the end of each month based on that month’s and historical traffic. The tiers will range from $1 to $50, and the higher the expected lifetime value of the customers a publisher sends, the higher the tier the publisher will receive. We expect that most affiliates with a history of driving good, consistent traffic won’t see a lot of variability from month to month.
Publishers that join after August 1st will be able to see what tier they fall in by going to the programs tab and selecting payments structure for the US program. This tier will be updated on the 9th of each month and will reflect the score for the previous month. The tier will be 0 for the first month while we calculate your first score. Note that your ACRU earnings in your reports will reflect this tier.
If you joined before August 1st, you will continue to only see the same volume-based tiers for now. In September we will release a new separate report that will allow all publishers to break down, by campaign, the quality of the ACRUs you are driving to eBay. We will send more details about this report in a few weeks.
Please note that this change only affects compensation for new user registrations (ACRUs). Payouts for revenue share will continue on the same volume-based tiers for both new and old users. While the current change only affects the US eBay program on eBay Partner Network, we are evaluating this system on a country by country basis and will provide additional updates as they become available”.
My question is how do we determine which tier our sites are ? For me it’s about quality site building mostly following Googled approach which hard to define in it’s self. The first thing all ePN users should start checking is inbound links. The inbound links from the banned users seam to be from porn sites, but we don’t know that for sure ! Is a thin affiliate site the same for Google as it is for ePN ? Also for me I will use Pepper Jam for some sites. I’m having succes with the PJ sites I have put up, but the Jury is still out if one is better than the other. I like PJ though and fully endorse it.
For me this change is a bonus seeing I strive to build high quality sites with original and relevant content. The issue is what dose ePN consider quality sites and traffic ? We will find out in due time. For now all ePN users can do is watch and see what happens. I’m sure we will see many more threads on forums like Digital Point and ePN from banned users. Hopefully we hear responses from EBay to these threads so we can decipher the rule and avoid mistakes others have had. ePN is one of the biggest payouts in affiliate Marketing you do not want to lose your account with ePN if you are in this for the long haul as I am. You could survive, but it would be hard. If SEM and SEO are not hard enough as it is.
Carry on
Piece Out
