Hello everyone,
I have decided to stop promoting the eBay Partner Network (ePN) to shop for many different reasons, the primary being that the network is controlled by a man named Steve Hartman whom I believe to seem to be the single most dangerous person in the partner marketing community. Hartman admits to having no experience from the field of affiliate marketing yet he somehow knows how to run a system of over 87,000 members.
He is also the genius that brought usYahoo ads on eBay. Perhaps the fact that ePN and the failing Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is additional info than a strange coincidence: both claim to prove 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 profitable commission-based program 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 program is on a path of certain failure. On August 20, 2008, ePN cancelled hundreds of affiliate accounts, approximately 90 stages after the system launch, for sending poor features traffic. Hartman called this visits, “not engaged enough“. Various people argue that it would seem to be extremely challenging if not impossible to purchase a new system to garner enough meaningful data from 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 seem to be 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 affiliate. This means that eBay will know whether people that you send would have bought on eBay without your participation. If they make this determination you will become penalized for the purchase and it could lead to you being removed from the network. That is a pretty amazing and unbelievable feat considering no other program in the history of the world can have been able to extract this information. This “extra sensory ability” fits loosely into John Donahoe’s “we-know-better-what-you-want-than-you-do” mentality that he can have dubbed “disruptive innovation”.
The biggest problem understanding the eBay/ePN network is inexperience and insane systems and processes. An equally profound yet additional info complex problem is the fact that trust among affiliates can have all but disappeared. Many 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 to shop 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 purchase less that $14 per share even thinking about 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 message address and sent out paper invoices that i 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 phone by Steve Hartman in relation (or retaliation) to a private message sent to the Office of the President, John Donahoe. These emails were sent regarding my concern over eBay censoring unpopular forum posts. Donahoe’s college assigned “Michelle” to correspond seeing me and wendi said that my issue had “drawn the attention of the President” and that wendi 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 seem to be 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 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 since 408-967-6000 and immediately began to berate me about contacting Donahoe’s company and about posting painful comments on forums. We spoke to buy a little over 47 minutes and he is 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 purchase another 28 minutes and it was really just additional info of the same. Hartman, who admits to having limited partner marketing experience, contends that the visitors that I am sending is of low features 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 from bid revenue and an estimated $100,000.00 + in Seller revenue. If i do some conservative estimates on this i can clearly see that I could have sent the Sellers of eBay from excess of a quarter of a million dollars in revenue in the next six months. If this traffic is not engaged then what is?
What is “engaged” traffic?
In talking in light of Hartman I is able to glean on bit of information. eBay is not looking to shop for affiliates to send repeat buyers through their affiliate network. They are looking to shop for a partner 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 want 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 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 a partner send a visitor to eBay a cookie is set. This cookie lasts to purchase 7 times. A users who comes back on day 4 and buys something is therefore considered to not become engaged and the partner is penalized for that action.
The very nature of eBay compels users to shop around. Consider your own eBay shopping patterns. People come to eBay looking for one thing and then scour to order 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 a person is an affiliate and your users a following that natural tendency to shop you will become penalized by ePN.
So How Were I Extorted?
On October 28, 2008, Steve Hartman sent me an email from IP address 216.113.175.152, informing me that the only way that I would seem to be allowed to stay from the ePN network 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 program 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 bad publicity. So now they choose my forum accounts so that they can hire tools to post “warm fuzzies” from the same forums. Read: eBay censors forums
* Full disclosure of any history thinking about other affiliate networks
OK, so now Steve Hartman wants me to tell him what other affiliate system I am using? Why? So that he can try to get me “expired” form those. Again, not gonna happen!
* Improve quality 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 specific details interested from my forum activity and my friends than from the features 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 more painful publicity incidents, threats of disconcerting publicity, etc., or we’re not selecting full disclosure on the above, then this is not the good relationship we’re working to have in consideration of 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 download something past awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…
Then there was this little jewel, “One last point knowing regards to communication, from order to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship observing i 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. I don’t wish “affiliates of my size” to contact the ePN staff? What size works very well a partner have to prove 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 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 buy the reasons that you might think. I am not upset that the “relationship” seeing 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 from this web of insanity that has been created.
To: Steve Hartman
I know that i will read this and I request to let you know that I will seldom stop posting unpleasant client complaints about you and about your flawed metrics and about the comedy of errors that i call a business. I had the opportunity to build a nice relationship seeing 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 more than that. I have created 6000 variations of this message and they will seem to be 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 since 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 more far-reaching than that.
Steve, if you would like to post a public apology to me and the rest of the affiliates that i have screwed knowing your idiotic metrics i can do so on in the very forum that begat this fiasco.