eBay Partner Network Review

eBay’s Affiliate Program is called the eBay Partner Network (EPN) and has traditionally been one of the most popular options for affiliate marketers. It’s one of the first programs many new bloggers and affiliates learn about and use. The website offers an online auction model in which users can purchase products by bidding or by buying at set prices. It is truly a great way to get targeted buyers to your offers.

If you’re already setup to sell your personal items on eBay anyway, why not have your EPN visitors funneled to your own website, add a lead capture and make even more sales. If you’re not already a member, the program is free to join and takes just a few minutes to get started. 

Welcome to our Partner Network Review
4.5 / 5 Reviewer
{{ reviewsOverall }} / 5 Users (0 votes)
Pros
  • Plethora of products to choose from
  • Free to join. No sign-up fees for new affiliates
  • Consistent payments. Available through PayPal or direct deposit
  • Great startup bonus. Double commission for the first three months
  • Intuitive tools for ads and links
  • $10 threshold. One of the lowest in the industry
  • Centralized system for international purchases
Cons
  • 24-hour cookie length 🙁
  • 7-day auction not aligned with 1-day cookie
  • Items not always available
  • Slow customer service




Summary

Earn money by driving traffic and prompting sales across one of the world's largest and most diverse marketplaces. You decide the best affiliate model based on your specific business.

Contents

Company

eBay Inc is a publicly-traded American multinational e-commerce corporation based in San Jose, California. It facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in the autumn of 1995.


As a publicly-traded company, eBay is owned by stockholders. The founder Pierre Omidyar is the largest stakeholder in the company.


It should be noted that in 2002 eBay had acquired PayPal but as of July 2014 the company shareholders agreed to split the two tech giants with the end result being PayPal was once again a single, publicly-traded company.


A complete history of the company can be found here.

Program Features

eBay connects millions of buyers and sellers around the world creating opportunities for buyers and sellers alike. The main eBay Partner Network page covers solutions, resources, and great information about the program. Some of the program benefits include:

Build Ads & Campaigns

Creating Affiliate Links - Affiliate links are the backbone of any affiliate marketing program. eBay has a variety of tools to simplify the creation of trackable URLs for every business model, all of which can be found in the portal’s Tools drop-down menu.


Creatives - The eBay logo is iconic. Promote eBay with the latest branded creatives and logos.


Help to Drive Traffic and Make Sales - Promoting items from your site is a great start, but you can also earn commissions on other eBay purchases. Don’t forget to include links to the daily "commissionable" deals and regional promotions.


Commissionable Deals - To see which deals are commissionable, you need to turn on the Deal Flag in your extension settings. After you enable Deal Flag, you can scroll through the eBay Deals pages.


BONUS: Commissionable Deals always ship for free and are  covered by eBay's Money Back Guarantee, which protects your users and ensures they receive exactly what they want - or their money back.


Exclusive events and promotions - eBay provides partners with the scoop on their best deals and promotions. Nice to be "in the know".

Tools

Link Generator - This tool points users to where you want them to land, whether that’s a specific listing, a page of search results, or even the eBay homepage itself.


Smart Share - A Google Chrome browser extension to create affiliate links while you browse eBay. More information about Smart Share here.


Page Types - Matching the right eBay page type to your promotional links and content will help drive conversions and commissions. Some of the types of pages include:

  • Category Pages
  • Product Pages
  • Search Pages
  • Brand Pages
  • Deals Pages
  • Promotional Events
  • Trending and Popular
  • Get Inspired

..and more!


Bookmarklet Tool
- The bookmarklet is a small Javascript app that runs within your browser. The Bookmarklet Tool provides a quick way to easily create affiliate links to any page on eBay from any browser. More information is available here.


Smart Placements - Remarketing, two ways: By shopper interest, or based on your content. Smart Placements delivers customizable, dynamic banners that identify visitors as they enter your site and update the items displayed to match your preferences or their browsing history. Once you set it up, the ads will continue to optimize without any additional intervention.


Help

The help center is extensive, comprehensive and provides everything that affiliates would want to know.

eBay Partner Network Help Center

Tracking Through Online Reports

Track and optimize your performance with reports that show:

  • Performance by Campaign: Analyze your performance data based on specific campaigns.
  • Performance by Category: Drill down to see your results across eBay’s various categories and subcategories.
  • Performance by Checkout Site: Discover your performance across different eBay global sites.
  • Performance by Custom ID: Explore how your traffic is performing based on this optional variable, which some partners use to further segment reporting data.
  • Performance by Day: Track aggregate performance for each day in a specific date range.
  • Performance by Month: Review monthly performance snapshots.
  • Performance by Tool: Uncover which methods of creating and sharing links is delivering the best performance.
  • Performance by Top Selling Item: Investigate your top transacting items, so you can further tune your performance.
  • Transaction Detail: Capture every transaction made using your affiliate links, with the ability to drill down to your most granular data.

All of the reports can be: viewed online; emailed (in real-time or scheduled in advance); downloaded as Excel, CSV, or PDF files; and scripted to be regularly retrieved through APIs.

Use the reports to determine:

  • Your earnings over the past several months
  • The trend– are they going up, down, or staying the same?
  • The volume of clicks your ads generate
  • Your most successful campaigns
  • The highest converting items you promote
  • Categories of interest for your visitors
  • Performance in different time periods

Once you have a better idea of what’s going on, you can dig in even deeper. For example, you might notice that one of your campaigns increased in earnings since the previous month. 

Categories

In all honesty, it would be futile to list the plethora of categories of products in this review post. In fact, I could probably not keep up to it if I were to update this post daily.

Commissions

Commission rates are based on the percent of a sale price for items sold on eBay

Below is the 'Rate Card" explaining the commission structure on various commission-able products and services. Downloadable PDF versions of all rate cards are available here.

A qualifying transaction occurs when an end user:

  • Makes a purchase within 24 hours after clicking your affiliate link for a “Buy It Now” item
  • Places a bid on an auction within 24 hours after clicking your affiliate link and then wins that auction within 10 days

Sadly, this 24-hour cookie is a significant drawback. Affiliates get paid for “qualifying transactions.” A qualifying transaction occurs when (1) an end-user makes a purchase within 24 hours after clicking your link for a “Buy It Now” item, or (2) a user places a bid on an auction item within 24 hours of clicking your link and wins that auction within ten days. A 24-hour cookie is a disadvantage because publishers must rely on customers to make purchases within that period to get credit.

Premier Program

This invite-only program for partners who drive substantial business into eBay offers benefits that include:

  • Exclusive content to help you increase your earnings
  • Early access to new tools
  • Fast issue resolution through dedicated support channels
  • Customized incentives and promotions to help you optimize your business

Definitely something to consider for those with high volume traffic or following.

Sign-up Requirements for EPN

  • You require to be at least 18 years old.
  • You should have or plan to have an eBay account
  • For the best success, you should have a website or other traffic source

How To Join the EPN?

Joining the EPN is super easy.

In the beginning, you should have an account on eBay. In case you don’t have one, go to eBay, click “register” in the upper left corner of the screen, and sign up for a free account.

  • You can sign up for a personal account or a business account.
  • Once you setup your account, scroll to the footer of eBay’s home page and fined “Affiliates".
  • Click on “Sign Up Now” and fill in your information.
  • After approval of the EPN Agreement, you’ll be taken into EPN directly.
  • Log in to the EPN account and you’ll be on a Welcome page.
  • Click the “Account” tab to view the drop-down menu.
  • Now complete the rest of your information.
  • Go to your dashboard as you're now an affiliate marketing partner with eBay.

That’s it! You’re done.


NOTE: Like other affiliate networks, eBay Partner Network has rules and policies that govern how partners are expected to work. Do yourself a favor and read your affiliate terms and advertising policies before doing any promotions.

A good place to learn about this is here: Common Missteps To Avoid

Conclusion

The eBay Partner Network does have its downsides as so do all affiliate programs. The 24-hour tracking cookies are quite an annoyance. This can be overcome by optimizing your affiliate site to adapt to the short-term tracking cookies, offering time-sensitive offers through a landing page. I believe eBay makes up for this by integrating the many features that help marketers attain success. With double commission bonuses, an incredible variety of products to sell, and help for creating ads and links, this affiliate program has quite a lot going for it.




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