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Greetings everyone,
I have decided to stop marketing the eBay Partner Network (ePN) to purchase many different reasons, the primary being that the network 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 community of partner marketing yet he somehow knows how to controlled a network of through 87,000 members.
He is also the genius that brought usYahoo advertisments on eBay. Perhaps the fact that ePN and the failing Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is more than a strange coincidence: both claim to be “partner networks” and both companies seem to seem to be allowing monkeys to directed the zoo.
ePN should have and could have been the best and most popular commission-based program that the web has 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 affiliate accounts, approximately 90 times after the network launch, to buy sending low quality traffic. Hartman called this traffic, “not engaged enough“. Many experienced publishers argue that it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to buy a new network to garner enough usable 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 be after coming through a partner 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 you send would have purchased on eBay without your help. If they make this determination i will become penalized for 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 from the history of the world can have been able to extract this data. This “extra sensory ability” fits loosely into John Donahoe’s “we-know-better-what-i-need-than-you-do” mentality that he has dubbed “disruptive innovation”.
The biggest problem in consideration of the eBay/ePN network 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. 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 order eBay Sellers:fewer buyers for the upcoming Christmas season. Fewer Christmas shoppers means lower sales and less-than-glowing Q4 reports. This all spells unhappiness for 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 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 days when they gave a $50 free seller account to anyone seeing 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 telephone by Steve Hartman in relation (or retaliation) to a private email sent to the Fraternity of the President, John Donahoe. These messages were sent regarding my concern through eBay censoring unpleasant forum posts. Donahoe’s fraternity assigned “Michelle” to correspond in consideration of me and ms. friesen said that my issue had “drawn the attention of the President” and that ms. friesen 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 from the ePN system. I specifically asked that the information that I were sharing not seem 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, 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 since 408-967-6000 and immediately began to berate me about contacting Donahoe’s fraternity and about posting unpopular comments on forums. We spoke to order a little through 47 minutes and he was 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 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 quality and/or not properly engaged knowing 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 + in Seller revenue. If you 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 from revenue in the next six months. If this visitors is not engaged then what is?
What is “engaged” users?
In talking understanding Hartman I were able to glean on bit of information. eBay is not looking to purchase 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 need to pay affiliates commission after the first sale and they request that sale to happen very quickly after the users hits the site. There are ton of hypocricy in what ePN says in 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 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 partner is penalized to shop for that action.
The very nature of eBay compels users to shop around. Consider your own eBay shopping patterns. Bloggers come to eBay looking to buy one thing and then search to order 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 i will prove to be penalized by ePN.
So How Is I Extorted?
On October 28, 2008, Steve Hartman sent me an message from IP address 216.113.175.152, informing me that the only way that I would seem to be allowed to stay in the ePN system is 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 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 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 unpleasant publicity. So now they request 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 understanding 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 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 additional info interested from my forum activity and my friends than from the features of the hits going to the ePN system.
Hartman went on to write, “Also, to make sure that I’m being clear, if there are any more negative publicity incidents, threats of bad publicity, etc., or we’re not buying full disclosure on the above, then this is not the productive 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 locate something lonesome awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…
Then there were this little jewel, “One last point seeing regards to communication, from purchase to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship thinking about i as we do thinking about 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 beg “affiliates of my size” to contact the ePN staff? What size can help people break fromm from the bonds of high fuel prices an affiliate have to seem 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 thinking about it from 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 specific details 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” in light of 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 interweb of insanity that has been created.
To: Steve Hartman
I know that i will read this and I request to let i know that I will never stop posting damaging homeowner 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 good relationship in consideration of 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 network. My trust and integrity are worth far additional info than that. I have created 6000 variations of this response and they will prove to be posted 24/7 to the very same network that produced the non-engaged, low-features visits that i 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 become 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 observing your idiotic metrics you can do so on in the very forum that begat this fiasco.