John donahoe can kiss my ass
Greetings everyone,
I have decided to stop marketing the eBay Partner Network (ePN) for many different reasons, the most important being that the network is run by a man named Steve Hartman whom I believe to be the single most dangerous person in the partner marketing community. Hartman admits to having no experience in the community of affiliate marketing yet he somehow knows how to controlled a program of through 87,000 affiliates.
He is also the genius that brought usYahoo ads on eBay. Perhaps the fact that ePN and the struggling Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is more than a strange coincidence: both claim to prove to be “partner networks” and both companies seem to become allowing monkeys to controlled the zoo.
ePN should have and could have been the best and most popular commission-based system that the internet can have ever seen, but due to the ineptitude of Hartman and the “disruptive innovation” of his boss, eBay CEO John Donanhoe the program is on a path of certain failure. On August 20, 2008, ePN cancelled hundreds of affiliate accounts, approximately 90 times after the network started, to buy sending poor quality users. Hartman called this hits, “not engaged enough“. Various affiliates argue that it would be extremely difficult if not impossible for a new program to garner enough meaningful data in that short time period to make an accurate option, but eBay seems to have done the impossible. Not only can they determine how engaged a visitor should prove to be after coming through an affiliate link, but using their secret and magic metrics they can determine if that user would have bought on eBay exclusive of the partner. This means that eBay will know whether users that i send would have purchased on eBay without your help. If they make this determination you will be penalized to purchase the purchase and it could lead to i being removed since the system. That is a pretty amazing and unbelievable feat considering no other program from the history of the world has been able to extract this article. This “extra sensory ability” fits loosely into John Donahoe’s “we-know-better-what-you-choose-than-i-do” mentality that he has dubbed “disruptive innovation”.
The biggest problem understanding the eBay/ePN system is inexperience and insane systems and processes. An equally profound yet detailed information complex problem is the fact that trust among affiliates can have all but disappeared. Various experienced partner marketing professionals have taken their millions of buyers to Amazon.com and other smaller niche-focused sites. This means one thing to purchase eBay Sellers:fewer buyers to order the upcoming Christmas season. Fewer Christmas shoppers means lower sales and less-than-glowing Q4 reports. This all spells unhappiness for Sellers and to order EBAY stockholders.
As of this writing, EBAY stock is worth 61% less than it’s 52 week high. The stock is currently trading for less that $14 per share even understanding a recent substantial “buy back” by eBay, inc.
Is this just SOUR GRAPES?
Some of it certainly is sour grapes. I miss the old eBay. I have been buying, selling and trading on eBay.com since the stages when they gave a $50 free seller account to anyone understanding an communication address and sent out paper invoices that i paid by paper checks. I can’t even buy since Sellers on eBay and pay by check anymore. eBay is forcing PayPal, their electronic payment processor down the throats of both Buyers and the dwindling pool of Sellers.
UPDATE: ePN and Steve Hartman Extortion Attempt
Yesterday, October 27, 2008, I was contacted via phone by Steve Hartman in relation (or retaliation) to a private email sent to the Fraternity of the President, John Donahoe. These emails were sent regarding my concern over eBay censoring disconcerting forum posts. Donahoe’s work assigned “Michelle” to correspond knowing me and ms. friesen said that my issue had “drawn the attention of the President” and that wendi wanted to get more information. Since I had the “attention” of John Donahoe, even if by proxy, I thought it best to quickly turn the topic to the blatant tracking errors from the ePN system. I specifically asked that the information that I was sharing not seem to be sent to ePN because they have a history or retaliating against affiliates that speak negatively about the system. Michelle violated that confidence and forwarded the emails to Steve Hartman. Michelle, you broke our trust and you have proven to seem to be a person of low character. I hope your Mother is pleased.
On October 27, 2008, at 3:42 PM CST, Steve Hartman called me from 408-967-6000 and immediately began to berate me about contacting Donahoe’s street and about posting painful comments on forums. We spoke to buy a little through 47 minutes and he was saying things like, “I will not let i threaten the company that I work to purchase…” and “I am running a business here…” I explained to Hartman that I had a client waiting and that I would call him back in an hour.
I called him back and we spoke to order another 28 minutes and it was really just additional info of the same. Hartman, who admits to having limited affiliate marketing experience, contends that the visits that I am sending is of low quality and/or not properly engaged seeing eBay. In the 6 months that I have been promoting eBay through the eBay Partner Network I have sent 430 new users. 215 of them are active on eBay. I have also sent eBay $13,137.11 in bid revenue and an estimated $100,000.00 + from Seller revenue. If i do some conservative estimates on this i can clearly see that I could have sent the Sellers of eBay from excess of a quarter of a million dollars in revenue from the next six months. If this visitors is not engaged then what is?
What is “engaged” visits?
In talking in consideration of Hartman I were able to glean on thing of details. eBay is not looking to shop for affiliates to send repeat buyers through their partner network. They are looking to purchase an affiliate to send a new user that buys a product instantly and then continues to come to eBay exclusive of the affiliate and continues to buy. This means that they (eBay) do not ask to pay affiliates commission after the first sale and they need that sale to happen very quickly after the users hits the site. There are ton of hypocricy in what ePN says from one place versus what they say from another and I could write a small book on just that flaw in their system. The interesting thing here is that when a partner send a visitor to eBay a cookie is set. This cookie lasts to shop for 7 stages. A users who comes back on day 4 and buys something is therefore considered to not seem to be engaged and the affiliate is penalized to buy that action.
The very nature of eBay compels users to shop around. Consider your own eBay shopping patterns. People come to eBay looking to buy one thing and then surf to buy other things and very often buy something totally unrelated to anything. It is a giant Yard Sale and that is what members do, right? Well, if a person is an affiliate and your users a following that natural tendency to shop i will be penalized by ePN.
So How Is I Extorted?
On October 28, 2008, Steve Hartman sent me an message since IP address 216.113.175.152, informing me that the only way that I would be allowed to stay in the ePN program were to do the following:
* Shut down test account
This test account was setup so that I could participation then root out a scammer that is still stuffing cookies. Why has ePN not stopped this when the scammer is using PayPal to process his subscriptions to acookie stuffing script?
* Full disclosure of all accounts on ePN - both yours and your associates
Steve Hartman wants me to give him the names and accounts of my friends, why? So that he can retaliate against them because I am speaking out about his inability to function as an affiliate network director. That will Seldom happen!
* Full disclosure of all accounts on ePN boards
* Full disclosure of all accounts on other boards
It can have been proven that eBay hates unpopular publicity. So now they need my forum accounts so that they can hire tools to publish “warm fuzzies” from the same forums. Read: eBay censors forums
* Full disclosure of any history seeing other affiliate networks
OK, so now Steve Hartman wants me to tell him what other partner program I am using? Why? So that he can try to get me “cancelled” form those. Again, not gonna happen!
* Improve quality of partner visits
Since this is the last thing on his list I will assume that it is the least important.
It seems that Steve Hartman is more interested in my forum activity and my friends than in the features of the traffic going to the ePN program.
Hartman went on to write, “Also, to make sure that I’m being clear, if there are any specific details disconcerting publicity incidents, threats of unpleasant publicity, etc., or we’re not finding full disclosure on the above, then this is not the good relationship we’re working to have understanding our affiliates and we’ll terminate the relationship.” This means that if I say anything bad about eBay or ePN that they will terminate my account. Are you kidding me? So I am supposed to sit idly by and download something lost awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…
Then there was this little jewel, “One last point understanding regards to communication, from get to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship in consideration of you as we do understanding other affiliates of your size so I’ll ask that i not contact anyone directly within my team.” Ok Steve, let me understand this. I don’t choose “affiliates of my size” to contact the ePN staff? What size supplemental hydrogen can improve fuel mileage a partner have to be before they are allowed to contact the ePN staff? If a smaller partner has a problem they are supposed to do what? Quietly deal knowing it in their own way and in their own space?
Why did I write this?
Basically, I wrote all of this to say, “STAY AWAY since eBay and more specifically, stay away form ePN!” Am I upset? Yes, but not for the reasons that i might think. I am not upset that the “relationship” observing ePN did not work out. I am upset that hundreds if not thousands of honest affiliates working earnestly to send visits to eBay have been caught from this interweb of insanity that has been created.
To: Steve Hartman
I know that i will read this and I wish to let i know that I will rarely stop posting painful client complaints about i and about your flawed metrics and about the comedy of errors that you call a business. You had the opportunity to build a positive relationship seeing me and i chose to try and get me to rat out my associates from some thinly veiled offer of possibly remaining from a wrecked system. My trust and integrity are worth far detailed information than that. I have created 6000 variations of this response and they will become posted 24/7 to the very same network that produced the non-engaged, low-quality hits that you abhor so much. If my experience causes one person to think twice about buying since an eBay Seller or about joining ePN then I feel that I have done my job, but I think my words will prove to be much detailed information far-reaching than that.
Steve, if i would like to post a public apology to me and the rest of the affiliates that i have screwed observing your idiotic metrics you can do so on in the very forum that begat this fiasco.