Meaningless

Constantly regurgitating why EPN moved to QCP does nothing to help publishers.

“Interesting. “, to put it mildly.

Let’s see how well that “value blah click something” is REALLY working:

- before, you had to trust Ebay’s tracking as well, but at least you DID know what to expect in commissions when you referred a sale or sent a new member. Now you need a big dice and a chief astrologer to predict the EPC of the day (Ebay uses the same methods). EPN is by far the most intransparent program on the planet, even AdSense is more predictable…

- tracking is faulty. Just one example: recently it was discussed on the EPN forums that all clicks in the category reports where reported as going to “other” Ebay sites, while in fact they were sent to Ebay US. Of course this impacts the EPC. Ebay’s reaction: none on the forums, lame excuses from customer support, and the column was conveniently removed from the reports. *lol*

I have to second what the colleague wrote above: you can still make some money with EPN, but do not work your butt off for them, – any effort should go into other affiliate programs for the time being until Ebay realizes they can not treat their affiliates like they currently do.

I couldn’t agree more with the last two commenters. QCP is a poor excuse for a fair and predictable compensation program for the affiliates. And as far as ePN goes I’ve never seen a “Partner” program treat their “Partners” as poorly as ePN. They suspend or terminate their “Partners” for no clearly stated reason. They answer every question (when they choose to answer) with vague irrelevant replies. Or they pass your question to another section, never to be heard from again. I’ll bet they have at least two significant problems with their reporting, stats, and tools every month. And I’ll bet if these problems were costing ePN lost income they would have them fixed such that they wouldn’t keep occuring but since the problems are costing the affiliates lost income ePN is in no hurry to fix anything. Software that is almost a year old should be bug-free by now. With all that in mind I could never recommend ePN as an affiliate program to anyone, and I too am putting all my efforts in building traffic for Amazon and their predictable, transparent program nowdays.

At first I was skeptical of the new quality click pricing rollout last year and it’s transparency thereof, but I must say that my earnings overall have proved to be equal or better in many cases, so I can verify it has been a good program and doesn’t cheat it’s publishers.

Well I have been with the EPN affiliate program for a few years now and only ocassionally do I have months that are lower now. Overall I have seen an increase and would recommend the Ebay affiliate program to all website publishers that rank well for most products. Actually, the EPN is my second best website earner, with only Google Adsense beating it in my websites’ earnings. Amazon only earns me 2/3rds as much, so I decided to take many of Amazon’s affiliate links off and replace them with EPN links instead. Amazon and their 1 day cookie isn’t a great deal for affiliates in my opinion.

In summary, there is a lesson here for all you reading this blog considering joining the ePN…

While you can make money with the ePN, be very careful not to allow your income to become dependent on this affiliate program. Their so-called Quality Click Pricing (QCP) system is unstable and their claim of you being a “partner” is dubious at best.

The entire QCP system and ePN are about as transparent as mud.

Serious Internet Marketing folks stay far away from it now since so many have reported about their earnings being lost and accounts closed with little to no explanation.

Support (or the ePN Partner Advocate, as its put) is the biggest joke you have going! Just visit the eBay support6 forums and look at all the unanswered questions. There was one forum post where the new ePN Advocate asked for suggestions for improvement, and three months later, has still not even replied to any of the suggestion posts in the forum! LOL

Relevantly speaking…. this video is not!

Hi guys -
Thanks for the feedback. A couple of points I’d like to respond to:
– Re: QCP and transparency – we’ve discussed this on our blog, but there are a number of reasons that we can’t just give away everything that goes into QCP. We do, however, share as much as we can and offer tips and advice on our blog for improving earnings with QCP. Affiliates who follow these guidelines are earning much more on average than they were prior to our move to QCP. In fact, the vast
majority of our affiliates are earning more under QCP than they were prior to the change. If you aren’t earning as much as you were or would like to be, we encourage you to check out our blog for suggestions on how to improve your earnings with eBay.
– On the click tracking issue – we did have a problem last week and are issuing makegoods. If you believe there is still a problem with your account, please email us at epn-cs-english [at] ebay [dot] com and we will review your
case. Please be as specific as possible with your issue,
in terms of dates impacted, scope of impact and anything else you think may help us diagnose the problem. We will be sure to have your email routed to the team that handles click tracking of as quick of a response as possible.
– Re: lack of communication in the forums, I won’t give a laundry list of excuses – there are a number of issues with the way this process works (and you wouldn’t believe me if I shared them here) – but I will say that we are just as frustrated with this process as you are, and we are working to change it. We do monitor the forums daily for major issues, however we realize that there is a need for more of
our participation and we are taking steps to improve that as I post here. Please stay tuned.

Thanks,
JJ

Interestingly: I put my comment on to the ebay partner blog a couple of hours ago… out of frustration. It went into moderation… and a couple of hours later, it has still not shown up. Is no one monitoring their blog, either. Bad bad bad form.

Hey guys, I’ve always had a timely response (24 hours or less in most case)s, whenever I use their contact form found when clicking on the “help” tab. Maybe that will help you, vs using the forum. for example Usually my questions are answered, or I can ask for more input/help if their initial response was too vague or didn’t apply to my situation at hand. The forum is probably most efficient for asking questions/input with other users at once, however I still feel good ol e-mail and/or contact forms are more direct, easier to manage, and overall more efficient with direct tier support.

I’m not sure how many other affiliate programs you have tried, however I’ve tried many of the course of the years and getting a response from Google’s Adsense dept is nearly impossible and Commission Junction and other networds respond virtually never.. It’s been in my experience, that their support is better than most. At least with EPN, you get real support in a timely manner.

thanks JJ for answering in this thread. Of course we would believe you if you revealed the causes for the non-communications on the forums. Anything is possible in this world, and specifically in the world of EPN…

Really hope you guys start to clean up the mess in the forums and start communicating. Most of us are not just bashing EPN, but are seriously frustrated about certain aspects of the so-called QCP and the way this affiliate program is handled in general – and the reason we are ranting is that we would like to see this program getting back on track and keep making money with and for you!

And @Scott Archer: while it is honorable to hold up the EPN flag (or is it your job – in that case less honorable but still ok ) please acknowledge the fact that there are other opinions out there, and the majority of EPN affiliates has given up or is seriously annoyed.

Regarding EPN support: yep, they DO answer in a timely and friendly way, usually. But first level support rarely can do more than give friendly but lame excuses and forward the issues to other departments – which must be living under a rock or in /dev/null or maybe they don’t have Internet access because I for one have never heard of any forwarded issue ever again…

eBay has made so many critical mistakes of cutting expenses that represented their life-blood in terms of partner and customer good-will and transaction activity. All eBay affiliates know that “Quality Click Pricing” tells that story.

Instead of focusing on expenses, eBay should have been innovating in ways to create more income.

eBay old-school management is solving problems in a short-sighted and bonehead way, with lack of leadership and innovation in an industry (marketplaces!) that has the potential to add multiple billions of $ of value through innovation.

eBay represents so much in wasted resource and real business growth opportunity, and “Quality Click Pricing” is a great example of what happens when bean-counters outnumber visionaries in management.

Here’s the future – the way eBay is going now, it’ll simply be Walmart along with a few needy people hawking items on isle 23. Well, that will be good for Walmart. But it’s not what eBay was supposed to be.