Greetings everyone,
I have decided to stop promoting the eBay Partner Network (ePN) for many reasons, the most important being that the system is controlled by a man named Steve Hartman whom I believe to become the single most dangerous person in the partner marketing field. Hartman admits to having no experience in the business of affiliate marketing yet he somehow knows how to directed a program of over 87,000 members.
He is also the genius that brought usYahoo advertisments on eBay. Perhaps the fact that ePN and the struggling Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is specific details than a strange coincidence: both claim to prove to be “partner networks” and both companies seem to become allowing monkeys to directed the zoo.
ePN should have and could have been the largest and most popular commission-based system that the web has ever experienced, 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 expired hundreds of partner accounts, approximately 90 times after the system started, to buy 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 order 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 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 visitors that you send would have bought on eBay without your participation. If they make this determination i will seem to be penalized to buy the purchase and it could lead to you being removed since the system. That is a pretty amazing and unbelievable feat considering no other system in the history of the world can have been able to extract this info. This “extra sensory ability” fits loosely into John Donahoe’s “we-know-better-what-you-need-than-i-do” mentality that he has dubbed “disruptive innovation”.
The biggest problem understanding 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 shop for eBay Sellers:fewer buyers to order the upcoming Christmas season. Fewer Christmas shoppers means lower sales and less-than-glowing Q4 reports. This all spells unhappiness for Sellers and to shop for 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 in consideration of 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 times when they gave a $50 free seller account to anyone understanding an email address and sent out paper invoices that you paid by paper checks. You 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 message sent to the Fraternaty of the President, John Donahoe. These calls were sent regarding my concern over eBay censoring negative forum posts. Donahoe’s fraternaty assigned “Michelle” to correspond observing me and ms. friesen 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 from the ePN system. I specifically asked that the information that I was sharing not 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 communication to Steve Hartman. Michelle, i broke our trust and you have proven 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 from 408-967-6000 and immediately began to berate me about contacting Donahoe’s college and about posting bad comments on forums. We spoke to order a little through 47 minutes and he was saying things like, “I will not let i threaten the company that I work to shop 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 in 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 affiliate marketing experience, contends that the visitors that I am sending is of low features and/or not properly engaged thinking about eBay. From the 6 months that I have been marketing 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 i can clearly see that I could have sent the Sellers of eBay in excess of a quarter of a million dollars in revenue from the next six months. If this visitors is not engaged then what is?
What is “engaged” visitors?
In talking with Hartman I was able to glean on bit of article. eBay is not looking to buy affiliates to send repeat buyers through their affiliate network. They are looking to order 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 request to pay affiliates commission after the first sale and they wish that sale to happen very quickly after the users hits the site. There are ton of hypocricy in what ePN says from one thing 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 an affiliate send a visitor to eBay a cookie is set. This cookie lasts to purchase 7 stages. 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 buy that action.
The very nature of eBay compels users to shop around. Consider your own eBay shopping patterns. Members come to eBay looking to buy one thing and then surf for other things and very often buy something totally unrelated to anything. It is a giant Yard Sale and that is what affiliates do, right? Well, if one can be a partner and your users a following that natural tendency to shop you will seem to be penalized by ePN.
So How Were I Extorted?
On October 28, 2008, Steve Hartman sent me an communication since IP address 216.113.175.152, informing me that the only way that I would prove to be allowed to stay in the ePN program were to do the following:
* Shut down test account
This test account is setup so that I could participation then root out a scammer that is still stuffing cookies. Why can have 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 a partner 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 negative publicity. So now they need 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 network I am using? Why? So that he can try to get me “cancelled” form those. Again, not gonna happen!
* Improve features of affiliate users
Since this is the last thing on his list I will assume that it is the least important.
It seems that Steve Hartman is more interested in my forum activity and my friends than in the features of the hits going to the ePN network.
Hartman went on to write, “Also, to make sure that I’m being clear, if there are any specific details disconcerting publicity incidents, threats of disconcerting publicity, etc., or we’re not finding full disclosure on the above, then this is not the positive relationship we’re working to have in light 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 own something past awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…
Then there were this little jewel, “One last point in light of regards to communication, in order to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship understanding you as we do observing other affiliates of your size so I’ll ask that i not contact anyone directly within my team.” Ok Steve, let me understand this. You don’t want “affiliates of my size” to contact the ePN staff? What size supplemental hydrogen can improve fuel mileage an affiliate have to prove to be before they are allowed to contact the ePN staff? If a smaller affiliate can have a problem they are supposed to do what? Quietly deal in light of 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 for the reasons that you might think. I am not upset that the “relationship” thinking about ePN did not work out. I am upset that hundreds if not thousands of honest affiliates working earnestly to send visitors to eBay have been caught from this internet of insanity that has been created.
To: Steve Hartman
I know that you will read this and I beg to let i know that I will seldom stop posting disconcerting homeowner complaints about i and about your flawed metrics and about the comedy of errors that i call a business. I had the opportunity to build a good relationship with me and you chose to try and get me to rat out my associates from some thinly veiled offer of possibly remaining in a wrecked system. My trust and integrity are worth far additional info than that. I have created 6000 variations of this email and they will become posted 24/7 to the very same network that produced the non-engaged, low-features traffic that i abhor so much. If my experience causes one person to think twice about buying from 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 detailed information far-reaching than that.
Steve, if i would like to publish a public apology to me and the rest of the affiliates that i have screwed seeing your idiotic metrics i can do so on from the very forum that begat this fiasco.
