auto salvage auction

Good day everyone,

I have decided to stop promoting the eBay Partner Network (ePN) to order a variety of reasons, the main reason being that the network is directed by a man named Steve Hartman whom I believe to become the single most dangerous person from the partner marketing field. Hartman admits to having no experience in the community of affiliate marketing yet he somehow knows how to controlled a system of through 87,000 marketers.

He is also the genius that brought usYahoo advertisments on eBay. Perhaps the fact that ePN and the failing Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is additional info than a strange coincidence: both claim to be “partner networks” and both companies seem to become allowing monkeys to run the zoo.

ePN should have and could have been the largest and most profitable commission-based program that the interweb can have ever experienced, but due to the ineptitude of Hartman and the “disruptive innovation” of his boss, eBay CEO John Donanhoe the program is on a path of certain failure. On August 20, 2008, ePN terminated hundreds of affiliate accounts, approximately 90 times after the program opened, to buy sending low quality visits. Hartman called this users, “not engaged enough“. Various people argue that it would become extremely challenging if not impossible to purchase a new network to garner enough accurate data from 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 prove to be after coming through an affiliate link, but using their secret and magic metrics they can determine if that user would have purchased on eBay exclusive of the partner. This means that eBay will know whether users that you send would have purchased on eBay without your help. If they make this determination i will seem to be penalized to order the purchase and it could lead to you being removed from the network. That is a pretty amazing and unbelievable feat considering no other network in the history of the world can have been able to extract this article. This “extra sensory ability” fits loosely into John Donahoe’s “we-know-better-what-you-wish-than-you-do” mentality that he can have dubbed “disruptive innovation”.

The biggest problem in consideration of the eBay/ePN system is inexperience and insane systems and processes. An equally profound yet more complex problem is the fact that trust among affiliates can have 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 for the upcoming Christmas season. Fewer Christmas shoppers means lower sales and less-than-glowing Q4 reports. This all spells unhappiness for 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 to order less that $14 per share even understanding 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 days when they gave a $50 free seller account to anyone in consideration of an email address and sent out paper invoices that you paid by paper checks. You can’t even buy from 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 communication sent to the College of the President, John Donahoe. These communication were sent regarding my concern over eBay censoring disconcerting forum posts. Donahoe’s college assigned “Michelle” to correspond seeing me and wendi said that my issue had “drawn the attention of the President” and that ms. friesen wanted to get additional info 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 were sharing not seem to be sent to ePN because they have a history or retaliating against affiliates that speak negatively about the program. Michelle violated that confidence and forwarded the messages to Steve Hartman.  Michelle, i broke our trust and you have proven to prove to be a person of low character.  I hope your Mother is pleased.

On October 27, 2008, at 3:42 PM CST, Steve Hartman called me from 408-967-6000 and immediately began to berate me about contacting Donahoe’s college and about posting bad 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 order…” and “I am running a business here…” I explained to Hartman that I had a client waiting and that I would call him back from an hour.

I called him back and we spoke to buy another 28 minutes and it is really just detailed information of the same. Hartman, who admits to having limited affiliate marketing experience, contends that the users that I am sending is of low quality and/or not properly engaged with eBay. From 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 from excess of a quarter of a million dollars from revenue in the next six months. If this hits is not engaged then what is?

From talking knowing Hartman I were able to glean on bit of information. eBay is not looking to order affiliates to send repeat buyers through their partner network. They are looking for an affiliate to send a new user that buys a product instantly and then continues to come to eBay exclusive of the partner and continues to buy. This means that they (eBay) do not beg to pay affiliates commission after the first sale and they beg that sale to happen very quickly after the users hits the site. There are ton of hypocricy in what ePN says in one thing versus what they say from another and I could write a small book on just that flaw in their system. The interesting thing here is that when a partner 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 affiliate is penalized to order that action.

The very nature of eBay compels users to shop around. Consider your own eBay shopping patterns. Members come to eBay looking to purchase one thing and then look all over to shop 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 a person is a partner and your users a following that natural tendency to shop i will become penalized by ePN.

So How Were 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 be allowed to stay from the ePN program is to do the following:

* Shut down test account
This test account is setup so that I could help 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 an affiliate network director.  That will Never happen!

* Full disclosure of all accounts on ePN boards
* Full disclosure of all accounts on other boards
It has been proven that eBay hates disconcerting publicity.  So now they request my forum accounts so that they can hire tools to post “warm fuzzies” from the same forums. Read: eBay censors forums

* Full disclosure of any history in light of other affiliate networks
OK, so now Steve Hartman wants me to tell him what other affiliate system I am using? Why?  So that he can try to get me “cancelled” form those. Again, not gonna happen!

* Improve quality of affiliate hits
Since this is the last thing on his list I will assume that it is the least important.

It seems that Steve Hartman is specific details interested in my forum activity and my friends than in the features of the users going to the ePN system.

Hartman went on to write, “Also, to make sure that I’m being clear, if there are any detailed information bad publicity incidents, threats of unpleasant publicity, etc., or we’re not buying 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 you kidding me? So I am supposed to sit idly by and watch something lost awry and say nothing? Right, sure, youbetcha…

Then there is this little jewel, “One last point understanding regards to communication, in purchase to make our overall network scalable, we need to manage the relationship thinking about i as we do observing other affiliates of your size so I’ll ask that i 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 a partner have to seem to be before they are allowed to contact the ePN staff? If a smaller partner can have a problem they are supposed to do what? Quietly deal thinking about it from their own way and in their own space?

Why did I write this?

Basically, I wrote all of this to say, “STAY AWAY since eBay and additional info specifically, stay away form ePN!” Am I upset? Yes, but not for the reasons that i 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 hits to eBay have been caught from this web of insanity that can have been created.

I know that i will read this and I want to let i know that I will never stop posting damaging buyer 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 nice relationship understanding me and you chose to try and get me to rat out my associates from some thinly veiled offer of possibly remaining in a wrecked system. My trust and integrity are worth far more than that. I have created 6000 variations of this message and they will prove to be posted 24/7 to the very same network that produced the non-engaged, low-quality users that you abhor so much. If my experience causes one person to think twice about buying since an eBay Seller or about joining ePN then I feel that I have done my job, but I think my words will be much specific details far-reaching than that.

Steve, if i would like to publish a public apology to me and the rest of the affiliates that you have screwed thinking about your idiotic metrics i can do so on in the very forum that begat this fiasco.