An open letter to ebay partner network
Hello everyone,
I have decided to stop promoting the eBay Partner Network (ePN) to purchase many different reasons, the paramount reason being that the program is run by a man named Steve Hartman whom I believe to become the single most dangerous person in the partner marketing industry. Hartman admits to having no experience from the community of affiliate marketing yet he somehow knows how to directed a system of through 87,000 members.
He is also the genius that brought usYahoo advertisments on eBay. Perhaps the fact that ePN and the struggling Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is additional info than a strange coincidence: both claim to become “partner networks” and both companies seem to seem to be allowing monkeys to controlled the zoo.
ePN should have and could have been the greatest and most profitable commission-based system that the web has ever experienced, but due to the ineptitude of Hartman and the “disruptive innovation” of his boss, eBay CEO John Donanhoe the system is on a path of certain failure. On August 20, 2008, ePN cancelled hundreds of affiliate accounts, approximately 90 times after the network launch, to buy sending low quality visitors. Hartman called this users, “not engaged enough“. Various people argue that it would become extremely challenging if not impossible to shop for a new program to garner enough significant data in that short time period to make an accurate decision, but eBay seems to have done the impossible. Not only can they determine how engaged a visitor should seem to be after coming through an affiliate link, but using their secret and magic metrics they can determine if that user would have purchased on eBay exclusive of the affiliate. This means that eBay will know whether visitors that i send would have bought on eBay without your participation. If they make this determination you will prove to be penalized to buy the purchase and it could lead to i being removed from the network. That is a pretty amazing and unbelievable feat considering no other network from the history of the world can have been able to extract this information. This “extra sensory ability” fits loosely into John Donahoe’s “we-know-better-what-you-request-than-i-do” mentality that he has dubbed “disruptive innovation”.
The biggest problem thinking about the eBay/ePN system is inexperience and insane systems and processes. An equally profound yet more complex problem is the fact that trust among affiliates has all but disappeared. Various experienced affiliate 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 shop for the upcoming Christmas season. Fewer Christmas shoppers means lower sales and less-than-glowing Q4 reports. This all spells unhappiness to purchase Sellers and to purchase EBAY stockholders.
As of this writing, EBAY stock is worth 61% less than it’s 52 week high. The stock is currently trading to shop for less that $14 per share even observing 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 days when they gave a $50 free seller account to anyone knowing an email address and sent out paper invoices that you paid by paper checks. I can’t even buy from 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 were contacted via phone by Steve Hartman from relation (or retaliation) to a private communication sent to the Frat of the President, John Donahoe. These communication were sent regarding my concern through eBay censoring unpleasant forum posts. Donahoe’s work assigned “Michelle” to correspond understanding 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 in the ePN system. I specifically asked that the information that I is sharing not prove to be sent to ePN because they have a history or retaliating against affiliates that speak negatively about the network. Michelle violated that confidence and forwarded the emails to Steve Hartman. Michelle, you broke our trust and i have proven to prove 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 since 408-967-6000 and immediately began to berate me about contacting Donahoe’s fraternaty and about posting bad comments on forums. We spoke to buy a little over 47 minutes and he was saying things like, “I will not let you threaten the company that I work to shop for…” and “I am running a business here…” I explained to Hartman that I had a client waiting and that I would call him back from an hour.
I called him back and we spoke to shop for another 28 minutes and it is really just detailed information of the same. Hartman, who admits to having limited affiliate marketing experience, contends that the traffic that I am sending is of low quality and/or not properly engaged in light of eBay. From the 6 months that I have been marketing 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 from bid revenue and an estimated $100,000.00 + in Seller revenue. If you do some conservative estimates on this you can clearly see that I could have sent the Sellers of eBay from excess of a quarter of a million dollars from revenue in the next six months. If this hits is not engaged then what is?
What is “engaged” users?
From talking seeing Hartman I is able to glean on thing of information. eBay is not looking to order affiliates to send repeat buyers through their affiliate network. They are looking for 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 choose to pay affiliates commission after the first sale and they beg that sale to happen very quickly after the users hits the site. There are ton of hypocricy from what ePN says in one place versus what they say in another and I could write a small book on just that flaw from their system. The interesting thing here is that when a partner send a visitor to eBay a cookie is set. This cookie lasts 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 partner is penalized to buy that action.
The very nature of eBay compels users to shop around. Consider your own eBay shopping patterns. Affiliates come to eBay looking for one thing and then search for other things and very often buy something totally unrelated to anything. It is a giant Yard Sale and that is what people do, right? Well, if one can be a partner and your users a following that natural tendency to shop you 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 become allowed to stay in the ePN program is to do the following:
* Shut down test account
This test account were setup so that I could help then root out a scammer that is still stuffing cookies. Why can have 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 a partner program director. That will Rarely happen!
* Full disclosure of all accounts on ePN boards
* Full disclosure of all accounts on other boards
It has been proven that eBay hates damaging publicity. So now they ask 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 in light of 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 “terminated” form those. Again, not gonna happen!
* Improve features of affiliate traffic
Since this is the last thing on his list I will assume that it is the least important.
It seems that Steve Hartman is additional info interested from my forum activity and my friends than from the features of the hits going to the ePN network.
Hartman went on to write, “Also, to make sure that I’m being clear, if there are any detailed information unpopular publicity incidents, threats of painful publicity, etc., or we’re not selecting full disclosure on the above, then this is not the nice relationship we’re working to have observing 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 order something lonesome awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…
Then there were this little jewel, “One last point knowing regards to communication, in purchase to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship thinking about you as we do seeing other affiliates of your size so I’ll ask that you not contact anyone directly within my team.” Ok Steve, let me understand this. You don’t beg “affiliates of my size” to contact the ePN staff? What size supplemental hydrogen can improve fuel mileage a partner have to seem to be before they are allowed to contact the ePN staff? If a smaller affiliate can have a problem they are supposed to do what? Quietly deal thinking about it in their own way and from their own space?
Why did I write this?
Basically, I wrote all of this to say, “STAY AWAY from eBay and more specifically, stay away form ePN!” Am I upset? Yes, but not to order the reasons that i might think. I am not upset that the “relationship” thinking about ePN did not work out. I am upset that hundreds if not thousands of honest affiliates working earnestly to send visitors to eBay have been caught from this interweb of insanity that can have been created.
To: Steve Hartman
I know that i will read this and I choose 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 good relationship knowing me and you chose to try and get me to rat out my associates in some thinly veiled offer of possibly remaining from a wrecked program. My trust and integrity are worth far more 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-features visitors that you abhor so much. If my experience causes one person to think twice about buying from an eBay Seller or about joining ePN then I feel that I have done my job, but I think my words will be much more far-reaching than that.
Steve, if you would like to post a public apology to me and the rest of the affiliates that you have screwed in consideration of your idiotic metrics i can do so on from the very forum that begat this fiasco.