An open letter to steve hartman
Good day everyone,
I have decided to stop promoting the eBay Partner Network (ePN) for many different reasons, the primary being that the program is controlled by a man named Steve Hartman whom I believe to prove to be the single most dangerous person from the affiliate marketing field. Hartman admits to having no experience from the business of affiliate marketing yet he somehow knows how to controlled a system of over 87,000 partners.
He is also the genius that brought usYahoo adverts on eBay. Perhaps the fact that ePN and the struggling Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is detailed information than a strange coincidence: both claim to be “partner networks” and both companies seem to become allowing monkeys to directed the zoo.
ePN should have and could have been the largest and most popular commission-based program that the net has ever experienced, 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 expired hundreds of partner accounts, approximately 90 stages after the network began, to shop for sending low features visits. Hartman called this visits, “not engaged enough“. Various experienced publishers argue that it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to order a new system to garner enough accurate data from 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 become 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 partner. This means that eBay will know whether users that you send would have bought on eBay without your participation. If they make this determination you will become penalized to order the purchase and it could lead to you being removed since the program. That is a pretty amazing and unbelievable feat considering no other program in the history of the world has 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 observing the eBay/ePN program is inexperience and insane systems and processes. An equally profound yet additional info complex problem is the fact that trust among affiliates can have all but disappeared. Many experienced affiliate marketing professionals have taken their millions of buyers to Amazon.com and other smaller niche-focused sites. This means one thing to order eBay Sellers:fewer buyers to purchase the upcoming Christmas season. Fewer Christmas shoppers means lower sales and less-than-glowing Q4 reports. This all spells unhappiness to buy Sellers and to buy 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 in consideration of 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 observing an communication address and sent out paper invoices that i paid by paper checks. You 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 is contacted via telephone by Steve Hartman in relation (or retaliation) to a private message sent to the Work of the President, John Donahoe. These communication were sent regarding my concern over eBay censoring damaging forum posts. Donahoe’s company assigned “Michelle” to correspond understanding me and ms. friesen said that my issue had “drawn the attention of the President” and that she wanted to get detailed information 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 were sharing not be sent to ePN because they have a history or retaliating against affiliates that speak negatively about the program. Michelle violated that confidence and forwarded the communication to Steve Hartman. Michelle, you broke our trust and i 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 work and about posting bad comments on forums. We spoke for a little over 47 minutes and he was saying things like, “I will not let i threaten the company that I work to buy…” 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 is really just specific details of the same. Hartman, who admits to having limited partner marketing experience, contends that the users that I am sending is of low features and/or not properly engaged in consideration of 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 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 in revenue in the next six months. If this hits is not engaged then what is?
What is “engaged” visitors?
In talking knowing Hartman I were able to glean on bit of data. eBay is not looking for affiliates to send repeat buyers through their affiliate network. They are looking to order a partner 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 want to pay affiliates commission after the first sale and they wish that sale to happen very quickly after the users hits the site. There are ton of hypocricy from what ePN says from one joint versus what they say from 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 to order 7 times. A users who comes back on day 4 and buys something is therefore considered to not be engaged and the affiliate is penalized to purchase that action.
The very nature of eBay compels users to shop around. Consider your own eBay shopping patterns. Experienced publishers come to eBay looking for one thing and then look all over 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 you might be a partner and your users a following that natural tendency to shop you will be penalized by ePN.
So How Was I Extorted?
On October 28, 2008, Steve Hartman sent me an email since IP address 216.113.175.152, informing me that the only way that I would become allowed to stay in the ePN network were 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 an affiliate system director. That will Seldom happen!
* Full disclosure of all accounts on ePN boards
* Full disclosure of all accounts on other boards
It has been proven that eBay hates unpopular publicity. So now they want my forum accounts so that they can hire tools to post “warm fuzzies” in the same forums. Read: eBay censors forums
* Full disclosure of any history in consideration of other partner 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 features of affiliate hits
Since this is the last thing on his list I will assume that it is the least important.
It seems that Steve Hartman is specific details interested in my forum activity and my friends than from the quality 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 more negative publicity incidents, threats of negative publicity, etc., or we’re not selecting full disclosure on the above, then this is not the good relationship we’re working to have in light of 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 i kidding me? So I am supposed to sit idly by and watch something past awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…
Then there was this little jewel, “One last point understanding regards to communication, in get to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship thinking about 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 wish “affiliates of my size” to contact the ePN staff? What size works very well an affiliate have to prove 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 in consideration of 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 since eBay and more specifically, stay away form ePN!” Am I upset? Yes, but not to order the reasons that you might think. I am not upset that the “relationship” knowing 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 in this web of insanity that has been created.
To: Steve Hartman
I know that you will read this and I beg to let i know that I will seldom stop posting unpleasant buyer complaints about i and about your flawed metrics and about the comedy of errors that you call a business. I had the opportunity to build a nice relationship seeing me and i chose to try and get me to rat out my associates in some thinly veiled offer of possibly remaining in a wrecked system. My trust and integrity are worth far additional info than that. I have created 6000 variations of this reply and they will seem to be posted 24/7 to the very same network that produced the non-engaged, low-quality visitors that i 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 additional info 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 understanding your idiotic metrics you can do so on from the very forum that begat this fiasco.