Greetings everyone,
I have decided to stop promoting the eBay Partner Network (ePN) to shop for a variety of reasons, the primary being that the program is controlled by a man named Steve Hartman whom I believe to be the single most dangerous person in the partner marketing field. Hartman admits to having no experience from the field 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 adverts on eBay. Perhaps the fact that ePN and the failing Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is additional info than a strange coincidence: both claim to be “partner networks” and both companies seem to be allowing monkeys to controlled the zoo.
ePN should have and could have been the best and most profitable commission-based network that the internet can have ever known, but due to the ineptitude of Hartman and the “disruptive innovation” of his boss, eBay CEO John Donanhoe the network is on a path of certain failure. On August 20, 2008, ePN cancelled hundreds of partner accounts, approximately 90 times after the program launch, to order sending low features visits. Hartman called this visitors, “not engaged enough“. Various experienced publishers argue that it would be extremely challenging if not impossible to buy a new system to garner enough meaningful 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 become 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 bought on eBay without your participation. If they make this determination you will become 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 has been able to extract this data. This “extra sensory ability” fits loosely into John Donahoe’s “we-know-better-what-i-request-than-i-do” mentality that he can have 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 has all but disappeared. Many experienced partner marketing professionals have taken their millions of buyers to Amazon.com and other smaller niche-focused sites. This means one thing for 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 for Sellers and for 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 with 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 with 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 were contacted via phone by Steve Hartman from relation (or retaliation) to a private message sent to the Fraternaty of the President, John Donahoe. These communication were sent regarding my concern through eBay censoring damaging forum posts. Donahoe’s company assigned “Michelle” to correspond in light of 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 become 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 calls to Steve Hartman. Michelle, i broke our trust and i have proven to become 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 office and about posting unpopular comments on forums. We spoke to shop for a little through 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 from an hour.
I called him back and we spoke to order another 28 minutes and it were really just specific details of the same. Hartman, who admits to having limited partner marketing experience, contends that the visitors that I am sending is of low quality and/or not properly engaged observing 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 + from Seller revenue. If i do some conservative estimates on this i can clearly see that I could have sent the Sellers of eBay in excess of a quarter of a million dollars from revenue in the next six months. If this users is not engaged then what is?
What is “engaged” visitors?
In talking in consideration of Hartman I is able to glean on thought of details. eBay is not looking to buy affiliates to send repeat buyers through their partner network. They are looking to order 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 want that sale to happen very quickly after the users hits the site. There are ton of hypocricy in 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 to shop for 7 days. 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 shop for 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 search to shop 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 is an affiliate and your users a following that natural tendency to shop i will prove to 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 from the ePN network were to do the following:
* Shut down test account
This test account is 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 system director. That will Never happen!
* Full disclosure of all accounts on ePN boards
* Full disclosure of all accounts on other boards
It has been proven that eBay hates negative publicity. So now they request 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 observing other affiliate networks
OK, so now Steve Hartman wants me to tell him what other partner system I am using? Why? So that he can try to get me “cancelled” form those. Again, not gonna happen!
* Improve quality of partner users
Since this is the last thing on his list I will assume that it is the least important.
It seems that Steve Hartman is detailed information interested in my forum activity and my friends than from the quality of the users going to the ePN program.
Hartman went on to write, “Also, to make sure that I’m being clear, if there are any additional info unpleasant publicity incidents, threats of bad publicity, etc., or we’re not getting full disclosure on the above, then this is not the nice relationship we’re working to have seeing 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 locate something lonesome awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…
Then there were this little jewel, “One last point knowing regards to communication, from get to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship thinking about you as we do thinking about 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 works very well a partner have 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 in light of 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 from eBay and specific details specifically, stay away form ePN!” Am I upset? Yes, but not to purchase the reasons that you 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 visitors to eBay have been caught from this net of insanity that can have been created.
To: Steve Hartman
I know that you will read this and I need to let i know that I will seldom stop posting disconcerting 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 nice relationship knowing me and you chose to try and get me to rat out my associates from some thinly veiled offer of possibly remaining in a wrecked network. 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-features users 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 prove to be much specific details 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 i can do so on in the very forum that begat this fiasco.