Bot Clicks Will Kill Your QCP

Many ePN (eBay Partner Network) affiliates have a long-standing problem with rogue bots clicking their eBay links. I guess no one really cared before QCP. I know that ePN surely didn't because they never bothered even trying to filter them before QCP came along. On their forums, ePN officially denies that bot clicks will hurt your overall QCP score, but just like with everything else they say about QCP, they're only telling you half-truths. So, in the tradition of the late great Paul Harvey, "Here's the rest of the story..."

For ease of explaination, well say that your QCP is $0.10 and you get 100 clicks a day, making you $10.00 a day in ePN commissions. You're going along day to day fat, dumb and happy collecting your commissions, then one Monday you get hit with 400 bot clicks. On Tuesday when your ePN dashboard and reports update, your QCP will have dropped from $0.10 to $0.02.  ePN is correct when they say you won't lose any commission because you will be paid for the bot clicks along with your normal 100 legitimate clicks.  So, 100 legitimate clicks + 400 bot clicks = 500 clicks at $0.02 per click which is still $10.00.  Good deal huh. Yeah, right... Hold on just a frickin' minute ePN. What about the next several days after the day after?

OK, here's what ePN avoids telling you. Your QCP won't jump from $0.02 back up to $0.10 the next day. It will take several days for it to recover back to where it was before the bot clicks happened. So for Tuesday's and Wednesday's 100 legitimate clicks, you're QCP may only go up to $0.04 and you're only going to get paid $4.00 for Tuesday and Wednesday instead of the $10.00 you should have made for those days.

Many affiliates have told me that a bot-click attack caused their QCP to drop from $0.18 down to $0.03 overnight and it took over a week to go back up to $0.18. If you routinely send several hundred clicks a day to eBay, this will cost you some serious money.

And don't think ePN is working hard to filter these clicks either. Affiliates on forums and blogs all over the Net have been reporting massive bot clicks showing up in their ePN Dashboards since QCP started October 1st and it ruined their QCP payout amounts. ePN chooses to simply blow-off affiliate complaints about bot clicks by claiming they are using  "industry standard" filtering methods. What a load of crap. Looks to me like the bot clicks are actually saving ePN money, so why should they make it a priority issue?

If you're only using the ePN Dashboard provided widgets to promote ePN, you probably won't have a problem with bot clicks because bots don't normally click links contained within JavaScript or Flash code.  But if you're using a third-party php script to promote eBay listings on your WP or HTML site, you "will" eventually get hit by bots.

After getting pleas for help from many of their 2000+ customers, the makers of phpBay Pro have updated their software to include highly effective bot filters and filters to exclude any clicks where the referrer is blank or not from a known browser. Since this bot protection update came out a couple of weeks ago, no phpBay Pro user has reported a bot click attack on any of their ePN campaigns.

So if you're a phpBay Pro customer, you need to drop whatever else you're doing right now and get over to phpBay.com to download the newest version. If you're using some other php script, you need to contact their customer service and tell them you need a similar upgrade. If they can't or won't upgrade your software, you need to seriously consider switching to phpBay Pro.  Nothing else right now is more important. Your QCP score and your future commissions depend on blocking bot clicks and bad referrers.