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eBay’s Affiliate marketing program revamped in the new year, 2021

While Amazon is the affiliate program of choice for many new affiliates, they’re not the only game in town when it comes to e-commerce platforms featuring millions of products.

eBay is another big player in that game.

Affiliate marketing is a referral program where sites pay commissions to affiliates who send traffic to their site which eventually results in a sale. In this case, eBay’s partners send their users to shop the eBay global marketplace. A percentage of those users will likely buy something after being referred to the company’s site.

The head of eBay’s affiliate marketing program explained the changes which the company made to the structure n 2020 in a little message to its members.  Michael Lill, Director of eBay Partner Network (ePN), believed that although there were a certain number of challenges to be faced by the company due to the pandemic yet ePN had a busy and successful year.

eBay gave sellers an incentive for enrolling in the program – as of June 15, 2020. Sellers who are already enrolled in ePN receive commission-free sales when buyers purchase through the sellers’ affiliate link.

“We made great improvements to our program that built upon the launch of our new platform in 2019,” Lill said, listing some of the 2020 improvements as follows:

  • Faster reporting which in turn with reducing the time lag for partner earnings reports from 48 hours to 5 – 10 hours;
  • A new, simplified global rate card;
  • A new, modern Data Feeds platform with programmatic access, faster downloads, larger feeds files, and new fields such as Shipping Details and Global Trade Item Numbers;
  • An improved Link Generator with URL shortener and QR code options;
  • A new and improved Sales & Events widget, to help you easily find the most relevant sales and deals events;
  • A new Deal API, allowing you to search for and retrieve details about eBay deals and events.

In addition,eBay had also made some changes that were unpopular with some affiliates.

  • In May, eBay cut loyalty affiliate rates to zero commissions.
  • At the end of May, it announced another change that affiliates interpreted as placing limits on certain payouts.
  • In June, it announced it was killing the ePN Dynamic Feed Generator, a popular tool that did not require the use of APIs, in effect disabling RSS feeds, sellers reported.

Why the changes?

It is not hidden that eBay’s sales revenue has been going down the road. Hence, they have increased fees to bring in some extra revenue growth and are also reducing marketing expenses to level up the bottom line.

Sanna Sharma
Sanna Sharma
Sanna Sharma is an emerging freelance content writer, specializing in content relating to e-commerce news. She is working with Ecommercenext.org currently. It is a platform that provides the latest e-commerce news, events, blogs, webinars, reviews, job postings, and analysis from around the world. She is a keen individual with competitive writing abilities and is always working on herself to become a better her.
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