Ebay has monkeys running the zoo
November 3rd, 2008[tags]General,,[/tags]
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Good day everyone,
I have decided to stop promoting the eBay Partner Network (ePN) to order a variety of reasons, the paramount reason being that the network is directed by a man named Steve Hartman whom I believe to prove to be the single most dangerous person from the affiliate marketing community. Hartman admits to having no experience from the business of partner marketing yet he somehow knows how to controlled a program of through 87,000 marketers.
He is also the genius that brought usYahoo adverts on eBay. Perhaps the fact that ePN and the struggling Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is specific details 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 largest and most profitable commission-based system that the interweb 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 terminated hundreds of partner accounts, approximately 90 times after the system opened, to order sending poor quality hits. Hartman called this hits, “not engaged enough“. Many bloggers argue that it would become extremely difficult if not impossible to buy a new network to garner enough accurate 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 purchased on eBay exclusive of the partner. This means that eBay will know whether people that you send would have purchased on eBay without your help. If they make this determination i will become penalized to purchase the purchase and it could lead to i being removed from 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 in consideration of 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 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 shop 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 to shop 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 times when they gave a $50 free seller account to anyone with an message address and sent out paper invoices that you 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 in relation (or retaliation) to a private email sent to the Fraternaty of the President, John Donahoe. These emails were sent regarding my concern over eBay censoring painful forum posts. Donahoe’s college assigned “Michelle” to correspond with me and she said that my issue had “drawn the attention of the President” and that ms. friesen 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 is 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, i 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 from 408-967-6000 and immediately began to berate me about contacting Donahoe’s fraternity and about posting disconcerting comments on forums. We spoke to shop for a little over 47 minutes and he were saying things like, “I will not let you threaten the company that I work 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 purchase another 28 minutes and it was really just detailed information of the same. Hartman, who admits to having limited partner marketing experience, contends that the visits that I am sending is of low features and/or not properly engaged in light of eBay. In 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 in bid revenue and an estimated $100,000.00 + from Seller revenue. If i do some conservative estimates on this you can clearly see that I could have sent the Sellers of eBay in excess of a quarter of a million dollars in revenue from the next six months. If this visits is not engaged then what is?
What is “engaged” hits?
In talking observing Hartman I were able to glean on thing of article. eBay is not looking to purchase affiliates to send repeat buyers through their partner network. They are looking to purchase a partner to send a new user that buys a product instantly and then continues to come to eBay exclusive of the partner 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 from what ePN says in one joint 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 an affiliate 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 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. People come to eBay looking to order one thing and then surf to purchase other things and very often buy something totally unrelated to anything. It is a giant Yard Sale and that is what bloggers do, right? Well, if you are an affiliate and your users a following that natural tendency to shop you will be penalized by ePN.
So How Were I Extorted?
On October 28, 2008, Steve Hartman sent me an communication from IP address 216.113.175.152, informing me that the only way that I would be allowed to stay from the ePN program were to do the following:
* Shut down test account
This test account was 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 network 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 negative publicity. So now they choose 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 seeing other affiliate networks
OK, so now Steve Hartman wants me to tell him what other affiliate 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 specific details interested from my forum activity and my friends than in the quality of the visits 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 disconcerting publicity incidents, threats of unpopular publicity, etc., or we’re not getting full disclosure on the above, then this is not the beneficial 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 i kidding me? So I am supposed to sit idly by and own something past awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…
Then there was this little jewel, “One last point with regards to communication, in get to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship observing i as we do with other affiliates of your size so I’ll ask that i not contact anyone directly within my team.” Ok Steve, let me understand this. You don’t request “affiliates of my size” to contact the ePN staff? What size really works a partner have to seem to be before they are allowed to contact the ePN staff? If a smaller partner can have a problem they are supposed to do what? Quietly deal understanding it from 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 specific details 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” with 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 in 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 unpleasant buyer 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 observing 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 system. My trust and integrity are worth far specific details 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 users 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 prove to be much detailed information far-reaching than that.
Steve, if i would like to publish a public apology to me and the rest of the affiliates that i have screwed in consideration of your idiotic metrics i can do so on from the very forum that begat this fiasco.