I have been a huge eBay affiliate for a long time now, and I have made some massive pay days in the past but when their quality click pricing came in 2009, it was a massive hit to my earnings and after that, my commissions tumbled.
Well, I managed to recover the sites and started making the commissions but not as nearly as well as they were before, but it still made the affiliate program a worthy addition to my affiliate marketing bottom line income.
I have been concentrating somewhat on my other ventures, and I do have my fingers in many other businesses, and I also have a lot of affiliate programs I do very well with but eBay has always been the easiest one for me to make money with and so was my program of choice, and also it was a program that I use to use to teach others how to get into the affiliate marketing world.
On October 1st 2013, eBay rolled out a new pricing strategy and to be honest I am always optimistic, but I am really struggling with this update and after reading over at the blog about all the other eBay partners that are struggling to make ends meet and are baffled by how this pricing structure is beneficial to the affiliates.
Ebay insists that the changes have not made any difference, and affiliates are not affected by the changes, but you can see below from one of my eBay accounts that this is not the case…
As you can see above that I have given 2223 clicks to eBay and made only £0.30 this is absolutely shocking, and it baffles me as to how this is better. I have been looking around and after contacting a few companies in my niche, I will now be passing the traffic to their sites instead of eBay and after reading lots of other people on the eBay forums they are also moving away from eBay and going to other merchants.
But if you look at the clicks above if I was using adsense to monetize the sites and say I was getting a mere £0.10p click I would still be getting over £222 a month based on those stats alone, and I can tell you now that my adsense cpc is a lot higher than 10p a click so worst-case scenario is that I just fill the sites with adsense and site back and relax.
Luckily, for me, I have my fingers in lots of pies so a slip up or set back like this does not really affect me at all, and it helps to keep my head clear. However, there are a lot of eBay affiliates who are getting their sites hit and are losing their full time incomes, and I can honestly say it is going to be very scary for them.
For eBay affiliates, the last couple of years have been terrible what with the Google slaps and kickings that they have been dishing out and now this latest update to the pricing structure it is not fun and is getting harder out there.
So what am I going to do?
Well as always I am going to leave a few of my sites open for testing, and I am going to see if there is way I can get the earnings from the eBay partner network back up and running which I am certain that I can. However, I am not sure I can be bothered as I am pretty sure eBay now does not want affiliates and that this is a way to squeeze them out and save money.
For the last few years, I have noticed that eBay has been struggling to keep up with the likes of Amazon and what not, and I think that they are trying to save as much money as they can and the easiest way to do that is to try to trick and con their way out of paying the affiliates.
If you have any questions or any suggestions on this situation, I am all ears and very interested to hear from other eBay partner affiliates to see what they are doing and how they are getting on.
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