Patience is not my thing and that’s what I need to be right now. I want to get the conversion from Commission Junction (CJ) to eBay as the affiliate tracker over with but I can’t complete this without the Build A Niche Store (BANS) software update.

If you haven’t yet joined up I advice you do so as soon as possible. You probably already know this but eBay is increasing commissions earned for the month of April so the sooner you change over to the new system the sooner you can earn bonus commissions. You can join up at http://affiliates.ebay.com/.

While I’m waiting I’ve decided to post some of my thoughts on the new eBay affiliate program.

Signing up for the program

First, people are getting hung up on the Primary Business Model choices. These choices include:

• Ad network/Sub-affiliates
• Paid Search
• Natural Search/Website
• Paid Placement

The best choice for BANS owners is Natural Search/Website as that’s exactly what we have: Websites. If you choose this option you will be required to enter a website URL in the very last box, titled, ‘Website URL (if applicable).’ Choose one of your BANS sites and enter it here.

As soon as you submit your application you see the following message:

Thanks for applying!

Your application is now being reviewed by the eBay Partner Network team. You’ll receive a response via email as soon as possible.

This also seems to be tripping people up. In most cases eBay will immediately send you an email asking you to click a provided link to confirm your email address. Simply click the link and you should be able to log in.

Watch the instructional video

After you log in the first thing I recommend you do is watch eBay’s instructional video. It has some good information that will help you get started.

Create campaigns

The next thing you want to do is create a campaign for each of your niche stores. The ID generated for each web site will be the ID used for tracking affiliate commissions. This is equivalent to the CJ PID number.

There is an option to create bulk campaigns but I couldn’t figure out how to do this. Instead I added each site one at a time.

Tracking will be more detailed

According to the video, affiliates will now be able to track a lot more information than we could with CJ. This includes the ability to see bids and winning bids. To me this means we will now see how many bids were made and be able to compare these to winning bids. The options available are exciting!

Tracking will also include being able to see what pages within a site is driving traffic, though I don’t know if we can use this feature with BANS sites. Campaign IDs track websites and Custom IDs track whatever page has been assigned to it.

When payments will be made

The video stated payments will be made at the end of the month for earnings from the prior month. This means we will have to wait two full months from the time of joining to receive any funds (assuming you earned commissions within the first month after joining). I’m just letting you know so you don’t freak out when you haven’t gotten any money right away.

Information can be organized how you want

This may not be a big deal to you but I’m totally anal about certain things and this is big to me. What this means is you can sort your campaigns by name alphabetically. It drove me nuts that I couldn’t do this in CJ. See, I said I was anal : )

Changes made to links

Someone in the eBay forum posted the following information about what changes will be made to affiliate links:

API links are easily converted by replacing:
sid= becomes customid=
trackingpartnercode=1 becomes trackingpartnercode=9
trackingid=CJPID becomes trackingid=CAMPID

You get the CAMPID from the link generator (in the link).

That’s all I have for now. The best thing you can do while waiting for the BANS update to be released is to create campaigns for each of your niche stores. If you followed my instructions to create a Safety on eBay page then you will need to update the link in that page (thanks to Denise for bringing this to my attention). I haven’t done it yet but you can probably create a Custom ID for this page since the code is added to the page through the Content section of that page.

Rochelle