Welcome to Smuggle Me

Today I received an email from eBay’s affiliate program. Basically they wanted to remind me that I needed to change all my ebay affiliate links to their new eBay Partner Network. The following is pieces of the email and my personal commentary.

Dear John,
As you know, eBay’s new global platform, the eBay Partner Network, went live on April 1st. We have gotten a great amount of interest and response to the new network’s new creatives, new single global registration, and enhanced reporting capabilities!

Note that eBay said they’ve gotten a lot of interest and response to this program. They didn’t mention whether this was good or bad response. My guess is most of it has been bad.

As a reminder – please register now and plan to complete your migration to the eBay Partner Network by April 30th, 2008 as we anticipate access to parallel reporting to discontinue shortly thereafter.

Note that unless you migrate your links, you will stop receiving commissions from eBay sometime shortly after April 30th.

This is really the core of this post. eBay wants users to go in and change all of their eBay affiliate links over to a new system. Sure, if you only have a few links this is not a big deal, but imagine if you have a few thousand links. I only personally have a few hundred, but even that has me overwhelmed at the thought of having to update them. I did some of them so long ago, that I’d have to try to remember what I was even linking to on eBay.

Basically a total pain and let’s be frank, hundreds of thousands of affiliate links won’t be changed because either the webmaster doesn’t get the notice, doesn’t care to change them, they don’t know where to find the links or they just have so many that they can’t change them all. I see most affiliate members doing like myself and only converting the links that convert well. The rest just aren’t worth the extra time to convert.

However, the real question is why should I have to convert them? eBay should honor those links as mine. It’s really a rather genius plan for eBay to be able to save a ton of affiliate money. By telling everyone that they have to update all their links, eBay can stop paying affiliate payments on literally thousand of old links that people don’t update.

Is this fair? Well, it doesn’t seem like eBay really cares. I mean, eBay isn’t doing this to save money. they’re doing it to provide better tools to their affiliates. Yes, that is a byproduct of this change, but I can’t imagine that this huge cost savings wasn’t part of the strategy too.

You can still receive an additional 5% bonus for all traffic tracked through eBay Partner Network in April 2008 (bonus applicable to traffic sent to Half.com and US, UK, Australia, Canada, Italy, India and Spain eBay sites). The sooner you migrate, the more you’ll earn! Just:
• Register at https://www.ebaypartnernetwork.com and confirm your registration via an e-mail you will receive
• Obtain your new links in the “tools” tab, then update your eBay links on your websites with the new code. See our migration guide for more details: http://www.ebaypartnernetworkblog.com/english/ebay-partner-network-migration-guide/
• Enter your payment and tax information in the “accounts” tab

See, you can even get a bonus for selling more eBay products. I wonder how this 5% bonus will compare with the savings from old affiliate links.

If you still have questions, we have several additional resources for you:

• Check out our new blog (http://www.ebaypartnernetworkblog.com/), and specifically our step-by-step how to get started guide: http://www.ebaypartnernetworkblog.com/english/getting-started/

• Take a look at our cool new video tutorials for help! http://eyeview.vo.llnwd.net/o23/eBay/FullMode/Player/Player.html?Video=1&Lang=EN.

• Get help from our other users on our new Discussion Boards (http://forums.ebay.com/db2/forum.jspa?forumID=1000000047)

• Or visit the HELP section of eBay Partner Network, where there are links in each topic where you can ask questions to our dedicated support team (note that you have to click on specific help topics to see the “Contact Us” link).

At least they did offer a bunch of support options. In fact, so many that it illustrates how overwhelming it is to switch.

Thanks for being a valued partner. We’re excited for a successful transition, and the opportunity to grow your business through even more innovation, information and communication moving forward!

Thank you, but if you were a valued partner you’d figure out a way to have commission junction track our old affiliate links for a lot longer. Shafting your “valued partners” with a whole bunch of work changing links is not a good way to thank your partners. A nice big fat bonus check would be a better option. Maybe that’s just me.

Sincerely,
eBay’s Affiliates Managers

Cordially,
Overworked Link Changer