The Transition of eBay to an In-house Affiliate Program

It’s been a while since eBay made the transition from Commission Junction to an in-house affiliate program as the eBay Partner Network, so I wanted to check in for an update.

I was able to catch up with some folks from eBay at PubCon about the latest with their in-house network.

They had a two month overlap with the two platforms during April and May, and by the end of May over 90% of their active affiliates had followed them to the eBay Partner Network.

At this point, they’ve got over 100,000 affiliates on the new platform.

One of the changes they made after the transition was to implement a system where referrers of the highest quality eBay members would be compensated accordingly.

This program was announced in August where they moved to a value-based pricing plan for Active New Registered Users (ACRUs).

The intention was to better reward top affiliates, provide incentives for other affiliates to improve the quality of their traffic, and pay fair compensation for users who have low lifetime value to eBay.

In the old arrangement, they were paying $25 to $35 per new active user, and now eBay pays affiliates $1 to $50 per new user.

The new pricing structure went into effect on August 1st for new affiliates and November 1st for all existing affiliates, and so far, more than one third of their active affiliates are now earning $28 or more for every new user they drive to eBay.

Several hundred affiliates are qualifying for the new $40 and $50 tiers.

Also, they have continued to make enhancements to their platform to provide more data to affiliates.

They now have a campaign quality report that shows affiliates which of their tactics and campaigns are driving the most engaged users.

Plus, there is a new report that tells affiliates which categories of products their users convert so they can improve their targeting.

Finally, they’ve added new Holidays and Deals Creatives and tools like their Custom Banner.

More details at http://www.ebaypartnernetworkblog.com/.