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The "ebay slap!"

by LB
3 replies
Looks like ebay is shutting down a ton of affiliate accounts. I heard from a few people who were running review/datafeed type sites and lost theirs.

There is a thread about it here: eBay Forums: August 20 Expirations ...

I wanted to address all of the board posts regarding the expiration emails that were sent last night.

These actions were part of our continued effort to focus on delivering the highest quality buyer traffic to eBay via affiliate marketing. To that end, we've been analyzing our program closely over the last few months. I know there have been a number of requests to provide insight into all of the metrics via which we are evaluating affiliate traffic, but unfortunately there's an active black hat community that is pretty effective at exploiting these insights so we can't go into details on them. However, what I can say is that in addition to earnings per click metrics (EPC), we look at a variety of metrics to see how users are behaving when they come to eBay.com - how engaged they are with our site, and whether the affiliate link clicks lead to incremental buying activity. As we've done this, we have seen a big discrepancy in how interested and active the traffic is that comes to eBay from different sources.
Interesting how he mentions the "black hat community" in the post and there have been numerous WSOs lately that have talked about ebay cookie stuffing as if it's no big deal...heh. Guess it is now, huh?

Seems like legit affiliates got hit too, though.

Anyone get slapped and lose their account?
#ebay slap
  • Profile picture of the author wilson765
    I think this is called moving the goal post. Is it me do eBay seem really scared at the moment? Every thing I read seem to suggest they are backs against the wall and loosing their grip somewhat.
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    • Profile picture of the author countonuspr
      I use the eBay affiliate program now, and it does decent for me, but I haven't been slapped yet. I am sure it is a matter of time though. eBay really messed over some people though big time. There were some people doing six figures annually on eBay and their accounts were cut. They had been affiliates for over 5 years. It is absolutely ridiculous and just boggles my mind as to why they are cutting people like this. These people will now just send their traffic over to Amazon.com or some other larger online retailer. They are literally just shooting themselves in the foot.
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      Paul Counts, Host of the "Count On Us Internet Profits Radio Show"
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