Epn has monkeys running the zoo
Hello everyone,
I have decided to stop promoting the eBay Partner Network (ePN) for many different reasons, the primary being that the program is directed by a man named Steve Hartman whom I believe to prove to be the single most dangerous person in the partner marketing field. Hartman admits to having no experience in the field of affiliate marketing yet he somehow knows how to run a program of over 87,000 affiliates.
He is also the genius that brought usYahoo advertisments on eBay. Perhaps the fact that ePN and the struggling Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is more 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 greatest and most profitable commission-based system that the web can have ever known, but due to the ineptitude of Hartman and the “disruptive innovation” of his boss, eBay CEO John Donanhoe the system is on a path of certain failure. On August 20, 2008, ePN terminated hundreds of partner accounts, approximately 90 times after the program launched, to purchase sending poor features visits. Hartman called this traffic, “not engaged enough“. Various bloggers argue that it would become extremely difficult if not impossible to order a new program to garner enough significant data in that short time period to make an accurate option, but eBay seems to have done the impossible. Not only can they determine how engaged a visitor should seem to be after coming through a partner 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 users that i send would have bought on eBay without your help. If they make this determination i will become penalized to purchase the purchase and it could lead to you being removed from the system. That is a pretty amazing and unbelievable feat considering no other network in the history of the world has been able to extract this article. This “extra sensory ability” fits loosely into John Donahoe’s “we-know-better-what-you-ask-than-you-do” mentality that he has dubbed “disruptive innovation”.
The biggest problem with the eBay/ePN system 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 partner marketing professionals have taken their millions of buyers to Amazon.com and other smaller niche-focused sites. This means one thing to buy 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 to buy Sellers and to buy EBAY stockholders.
As of this writing, EBAY stock is worth 61% less than it’s 52 week high. The stock is currently trading for less that $14 per share even observing 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 communication address and sent out paper invoices that i paid by paper checks. I can’t even buy since 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 was contacted via telephone by Steve Hartman in relation (or retaliation) to a private email sent to the Work of the President, John Donahoe. These communication were sent regarding my concern over eBay censoring negative forum posts. Donahoe’s office assigned “Michelle” to correspond understanding me and wendi said that my issue had “drawn the attention of the President” and that ms. friesen wanted to get specific details 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 was sharing not become 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 calls to Steve Hartman. Michelle, you broke our trust and you have proven to become 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 work 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 in an hour.
I called him back and we spoke to purchase another 28 minutes and it were really just detailed information of the same. Hartman, who admits to having limited partner marketing experience, contends that the users that I am sending is of low quality and/or not properly engaged with eBay. In 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 + from Seller revenue. If you do some conservative estimates on this you can clearly see that I could have sent the Sellers of eBay in excess of a quarter of a million dollars in revenue in the next six months. If this visitors is not engaged then what is?
What is “engaged” visitors?
From talking seeing Hartman I was able to glean on bit of information. eBay is not looking to shop for affiliates to send repeat buyers through their partner network. They are looking to shop for 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 want 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 from what ePN says in one joint versus what they say from another and I could write a small book on just that flaw from 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 be engaged and the partner is penalized to order that action.
The very nature of eBay compels users to shop around. Consider your own eBay shopping patterns. Affiliates come to eBay looking for one thing and then search for 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 you might be an affiliate and your users a following that natural tendency to shop i will become penalized by ePN.
So How Is I Extorted?
On October 28, 2008, Steve Hartman sent me an message 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 system was to do the following:
* Shut down test account
This test account were 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 network director. That will Never happen!
* Full disclosure of all accounts on ePN boards
* Full disclosure of all accounts on other boards
It can have been proven that eBay hates disconcerting publicity. So now they choose 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 with other partner networks
OK, so now Steve Hartman wants me to tell him what other partner network I am using? Why? So that he can try to get me “cancelled” form those. Again, not gonna happen!
* Improve features of affiliate traffic
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 from my forum activity and my friends than from the quality of the hits going to the ePN program.
Hartman went on to write, “Also, to make sure that I’m being clear, if there are any specific details damaging publicity incidents, threats of damaging publicity, etc., or we’re not owning full disclosure on the above, then this is not the beneficial relationship we’re working to have knowing 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 i kidding me? So I am supposed to sit idly by and view something lonesome awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…
Then there was this little jewel, “One last point seeing regards to communication, in get to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship in light of i as we do in consideration of other affiliates of your size so I’ll ask that you not contact anyone directly within my team.” Ok Steve, let me understand this. You don’t ask “affiliates of my size” to contact the ePN staff? What size works very well 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 seeing it in 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 detailed information 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” 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 net of insanity that has been created.
To: Steve Hartman
I know that you will read this and I ask to let i know that I will rarely stop posting bad client complaints about i and about your flawed metrics and about the comedy of errors that you call a business. You had the opportunity to build a positive relationship with me and i chose to try and get me to rat out my associates in some thinly veiled offer of possibly remaining from a wrecked network. My trust and integrity are worth far specific details than that. I have created 6000 variations of this reply and they will become posted 24/7 to the very same network that produced the non-engaged, low-quality users 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 become much additional info far-reaching than that.
Steve, if i would like to post a public apology to me and the rest of the affiliates that i have screwed in consideration of your idiotic metrics i can do so on from the very forum that begat this fiasco.
