The last few days have seen the rollout of the eBay Partners Network aka eBay’s in-house affiliate program. Being mildly brain damaged from it being tax season, I decided I’d put off any serious work at getting the portions of my sites that use eBay converted to the new, non-CJ program until, oh, the 16th. Or maybe the 20th — let a few brain cells grow back and all.

And honestly, even if the switchover date was June 1st rather than April 1st, I still would have held off. I don’t generally enjoy being a beta tester. With something this major — and I’d call switching over quite likely the largest affiliate program out there to an in-house program a major undertaking — problems are bound to pop up. And of course, they did, and likely will for awhile yet. Such as:

• Like the on-the-ball developers that they are, Kevin & Adam from Build A Niche Store had code ready to go when eBay threw the switch. Of course, since they really had no way of fully testing it before the system was actually up and running, there were a handful of bugs. That they were cleared up in no time is a testament to their attentions.
• Just today we see an extended bit of trouble with the eBay RSS feed (which many affiliates use). Namely, that they were slow as molasses. Oh, and that they were apparently not passing along your affiliate IDs. You know, just little things…

photo credit: RichieC

I did upgrade one of my sites to the new system, more to play than anything. Went smooth as could be. Of course, it’s essentially a new BANS site, so I wasn’t concerned about wasting the almost nonexistent traffic it draws right now.

What really gets me is the reactions I’ve seen online about these little snafus. Ranting and raving and foaming at the mouth and the-sky-is-falling-the-sky-is-falling. Someone needs a lesson in the law of attraction. I’ll just take it as my periodic reminder that time spent on most forums is a wasteful distraction to actually getting anything done.

Oh, and ROCK CHALK JAYHAWK! They sure tried their best to make it interesting, didn’t they!

I feel for the sellers, but considering I make a cut of eBay’s cut, any potential increase is just icing on my already tasty cake…

What has me especially amazed about this little script is it’s success. Not necessarily monetarily - I’m definitely not bringing it in hand over fist yet. But the traffic it’s bringing in on each of the sites I have it running on is impressing me. For instance, my ugg shoe site is pulling in just shy of 40 uniques a day, from a high of 2 prior to the new script being installed a week ago. Too early to tell on commissions from the eBay/Amazon items, but enough AdSense/Chitika earnings to essentially pay for the domain registration in that short period.

If I could pull off similar results fairly consistently, considering the minimal effort invested in the site - outside of the initial script development itself, of course - I could see putting up a couple hundred comparable sites in no time. Like, say, over a weekend. The potential is a mind-boggling!

The next couple days has me wanting to spend a little time back in BANS development mode. While the parks have potential for a trickling income (having flood potential with enough trickles), I still believe the more developed niche stores have much greater potential for real single-site passive income. Plus, I like building them…

I like knowing what I sold on eBay via my Niche Stores, but Commission Junction doesn’t make it exactly clear how to go about getting this info. I keep seeing people trying to find out this info on the Build A Niche Store members forum, so I thought I’d throw up a quick writeup that I could point people, ’cause I’m that nice a guy and all, you know…

Step One: Log into your Commission Junction account

Pretty self-explanatory. If you can’t figure this one out, you’ve got more problems than how to find what you earned a commission on…

Step Two: Run A Report

Select ‘Run Reports’ from the top menu:

Step Three: View Pending Commissions

Along the right side should be a few boxes with the latest stats. Under Pending Commissions, click on your latest commissions:

Step Four: Find the daily commission you’re interested in

Select the commission you’re curious about:

Step Five:

Finally, we get to were CJ decided to hide the meaty details — in the Excel version of this report. Your guess as to why is as good as mine, so no, I don’t know why either. Select the Excel format and Submit to download:

Step Six: Find the eBay Item Number

The column titled ‘Order_ID‘ (P here) gives us what we are looking for — the eBay item number. It is the second number in that column (300173673592 in this example):

Step Seven: Search for the Item Number

Go to eBay, and enter that number in the search box:

Step Eight: A Coupon? You don’t say…

And finally, there we have it. The commission came from this item:

Be prepared to find some oddball stuff. That seven day cookie gives people all sorts of time to find weird things on eBay!

Hope that was useful!