ebay increases commission

[pericom]

"Thank you for being an eBay affiliate.

On July 1, 2004, eBay will be raising commission rates by up to 100% and issuing a new set of Terms and Conditions. Details on these changes along with the exciting launch of eBay's API tier for affiliates will be provided in next week's monthly newsletter. eBay is conscious that recent changes to our program have made earning attractive commissions challenging and so we wanted to be aggressive with our price changes to reward your continuing dedication to our program."

Hmm I've been reading the abestweb forum loads of unhappy affiliates.

Ebay USA affiliate program sucks..

Ebay UK program sucks some more.

Im in the middle of changing all my links from ebay to google adsense - at least they dont reverse!

No point in seeing loads of 0.03p and 0.00 registrations.. and then the next day a load of red reversals.

Nice one ebay usa & uk you certainly know how to kill a program.

[Dynamoo]

I think I've made 6p with eBay this week. Wooo.. that could be 12p with these new rates.

Besides, I've discovered that the fraud rate in the markets I target is *so* high and there are so many blatantly bogus ads I really don't feel like sending my punters there to get ripped off.

The old Amazon keywords thing seems to be much better than the eBay listings too.. although AdSense revenues are doing very nicely

[Luke]

I cant believe there isnt an alternative to Ebay - such a shame!

[Mogga]

What commission rates would you want?

[Barry]

Has anyone out there invested in joining the API developers section for $250.

If so what do they supply for the $250, just access to an xml feed(s) or any web based php/asp software for utilizing the feeds.

I'm sure it could be very lucrative even at the low rates they offer to have access to a range of products as wide as what ebay offers.

[Aquanuke]

Ive been an eBay developer since it started about a year ago. The API is a fantastic bit of kit.. what does it do? pretty much everything, well it does do everything actually

You can if you want create a whole replica of eBay from it.. that includes everything, validating users, adding items blah blah blah...

Ive had a developers token so ive never paid anything, but for $250 its well worth it if you can find a use for it.

For your $250 you will only get access no scripts or software.

[Aquanuke]

The original API package did include a number of samples, things like VB and windows apps, and some simple cgi and php shell scripts.

I only had a quick look at them and they where very basic and quite limited.. however this was last summer so maybe they have packaged it with more useful scripts.

However its not to difficult to write your own app. I ended up using PHP and Sabalot for my own app. Also there will be some apps available for sale latter.

[Rich]

I had been looking at the API for a while, thinking it would be easy to make a crawlable version of ebay to get some search engine traffic. The problem with this is they have recently changed their setup to use more friendly urls and allow bots to crawl more deeply. And you can imagine how much PR they have to pass down to these pages!!
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...ebay.com&meta=

I've sent the new affiliate team a few questions, but if your interested in it I would join the individual tier, which is free and will let you try stuff in their sandbox without having to pay the $250 in advance.

Just watch out for the minimum convertion requirements!

[Barry]

Cheers all, I'll go apply for an individual api and have a gander.

[drivetowin]

Where do I have to go to apply for the API - bit confused - is it on CJ or on Ebay?

[Rich]

It's here: - http://developer.ebay.com/devprogram.../affiliate.asp

[drivetowin]

Cheers Rich