phpBay Pro

• Referrer Checking.
• Browser Checking.
• IP Address/Range Blocking

Referrer Checking: When someone clicks on one of your SEO URL links, phpBay Pro first checks the referrer to make sure the click originated from your site and is not blank. If the referrer information fails this test, the redirect to eBay is aborted and a blank page is shown to whoever/whatever clicked the link. You can easily modify this page to display any content you like.

Browser Checking: If the click passes the referrer check, the next thing phpBay does is check the users browser against a list of known/acceptable Web browsers that you can edit. If the reported browser does not match one on your "whitelist," the redirect to eBay is aborted and a blank page is loaded.

IP Address/Range Blocking: Last, but not least, phpBay checks the clicks IP address. If this address matches a specific IP address or falls within a "range" of addresses on your "blocked" list, phpBay will abort the redirect and load a blank page. This is more efficient than having a list of blocked IP addresses in your .htaccess file because it is only processed when someone clicks a SEO URL link, not every time a page is loaded like with .htaccess. Adding/Deleting IP addresses or IP Ranges from the list is easy.

Live Example:

Below are three live eBay listings created with phpBay. Move your mouse over the links and look at your browser's status bar (bottom), See how the links look like they go to another page on this site? Now click one of the links and watch phpBay open a new browser tab (optional), rewrite (roverize) the link and send you to eBay. Now test phpBay's security features by right-clicking on any link below, then copy/paste the link into a HTML file and upload it to your server. Now dispay the page you made in your browser and click the link. phpBay will know that link didn't come from this site and will display a local page instead of sending you to eBay. Nice!! You will get the same result if your browser trys to block the referrer or if you are reading this article using some unknown browser. Also if I have added your IP address (or your countries IP range) to my IP blocking list.

US Auctions Australian Auctions Austrian Auctions Belgian Auctions Canadian Auctions French Auctions German Auctions Indian Auctions Irish Auctions Italian Auctions Dutch Auctions Polish Auctions Spanish Auctions Swiss Auctions UK Auctions

Best Match Time: ending soonest Time: newly listed Price: lowest first Price: highest first Price + Shipping: lowest first Price + Shipping: highest first

Betty Crockers Picture Cook Book 1950

Betty Crocker New Picture Cookbook 1950 1st edition EXC

Betty Crockers Cookbook1972 Sears Red Pie Hardcover

Powered by phpBay Pro

In case you haven't figured it out already, QCP is actually just PPC, regardless of all the propaganda ePN is not-so cleverly weaving into their forum and blog posts. Sources tell me they have even taken to telephoning some of the more publicly vocal affiliates with rhetoric speeches trying to win them over. But, just like the so-called "Government Option" in the U.S. health-care reform debate, only a minority are buying into it.  If you could climb way up the ladder and look down at the entire ePN affiliate forest instead of just seeing your personal tree, you may see that QCP is no more than just a radical scheme to dramatically cut program costs by achieving an overall reduction in affiliate payouts and give eBay more bang for thier affiliate buck.

So now that we're firmly within the realm of reality here, let's get down to the business of how to best work with the new ePN PPC system.

I'm sure it is an unintended consequence, but now that ePN's new PPC payout method is live, it can be compared to AdSense and Chitika's PPC in a "apples-to-apples" analysis. If your current ePN PPC is more than about $0.25 per click, you're good to go, just start slamming eBay with clicks. If your current ePN PPC is lacking, as countless affiliates are reporting all around the Net, good old Google AdSense may be the answer to your downturn in ePN commissions.

It will depend on your overall site layout, but I suggest placing a double 250x250 square AdSense ad on TOP of your eBay listings. Create the ad to display text-only links and make the ad's border the same color as your background. Make the title color #0000CC, the text color #333333 and the link color #666666. If your not sure how to make the two 250x250 AdSense ads display side-by-side, here's some HTML you can work with:

<table width=100% border=0>
<tr>
<td align=center width=50%>
<!-- Google Code Here -->
</td>
<td align=center width=50%>
<!-- Google Code Here -->
</td>
</tr>
</table>

The end product should look something like this:

250x250 Double AdSense Ad

If you have room in your sidebar, you can also display a 160x600 Chitika ad. I mean, you've been forced into playing the PPC game, so you might as well play it smart and cover all your options, right?  If you don't know about Chitika PPC, click the yellow stripe at at the top of this page for details.

AdSense is probably going to pay you a lot more than your current ePN PPC and Chitika will probably pay you just as much as you current ePN PPC, so test it out for a couple of weeks and see if the addition of AdSense and Chitika raises your site's daily average earnings back to where it was before the whole ePN PPC mess started.

If it works out for you, post a comment below and let me know.

Until then, remember... You've gotta' fight to get and keep your piece of the affiliate pie!

I never wrote about it before because this kind of thing is difficult to verify. Most of the people locked out of their PayPal account learned why during a phone call to PayPal and didn't record the conversation. But now it's happened too so many people that the only logical conclusion is that it must be true.

Can ePN legally limit or suspend your PayPal account while they do a internal investigation of your eBay Affiliate marketing tactics? I don't know. But I do know that just because they may slip some clause into their TOS (PayPal or ePN) doesn't automatically make it legal or enforceable. That's what court judges are there for. It has come to my attention that some people want to sue eBay/ePN/PayPal for contractual misconduct. Here is a Web post where a affiliate is looking for a lawyer to represent them.

http://www.theattorneysforum.com/personal-cases-help/3227-possible-case-against-ebay-partner-network-paypal-please-advise.html

In my opinion, the best way to fight eBay and make them pay for mistreating affiliates is to ban together and hire attorneys as a group, not individually. Trust me on this; Most trial lawyers are greedy as hell and eBay has deep pockets. If they think they can present a winning case, they will be all over it.

Anyone who thinks the "little people" can't successfully fight and win needs to look up where hourly Walmart employees in Oregon won a settlement because Walmart was shaving time from their time cards.

In the meantime, if you are a member of the eBay Partner Network (ePN) and you are also a eBay seller, you need to know that those fools at ePN can really screw up your eBay sales by having PayPal limit or suspend your PayPal account.

If you sell items on the Net using your own Website and you use PayPal as your payment processor, you need to protect yourself by either deleting your ePN account or changing your payment processor to Google Payments or 2CheckOut.com.

Most of the people who end up here on my site are ePN affiliates disgusted with the foolish antics and apparent instability of the eBay Partner Network. They are either looking for ways to compensate for declining ePN commissions, or they just wish they could wash their hands of ePN all together.

I typically show people how to monetize their sites with AdSense and I show them how to use eBay listings as SEO to promote other (respectable) programs, but I have never been in the business of reviewing and recommending affiliate software products. Now I am compelled to make an exception because of a system I was recently introduced too. It's called "WPMage" and it's tools are so unique and innovative, I am simply blown away.

I have been in the Internet marketing world for years and I have experimented with a lot of different methods for making money. After a while, I even began to believe I knew it all.

Then, I watched video 3 of the Mage Blueprint training program and thought, "How could I have missed something so simple yet so effective?" Crap!!

If you're a Wordpress user and you're looking for ways to increase your ePN QCP, or your looking for viable alternatives to ePN, WPMage is what you are looking for. Important: Use the code: MAGEMASTER and get $300 off the introductory price of this program!

www.wpmage.com/mage/e7cd7c6e

Now I'm off to watch video 4...

Militant

PS - I was pleasantly surprised to learn that once I claimed my free Blueprint I also got a $200 plugin for free. And yes, once you see what it does, you will be blown away too!

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.

Example 1) The following really happened to a ePN member whom I know personally. Back in September, he got an email from ePN telling him his account was terminated for alleged cookie stuffing. Now, anyone who knows this guy knows that the allegation is ridiculous. From a techie standpoint, he has no clue what cookie stuffing means. He appealed to ePN and although it took them three weeks to get around to it, they agreed (without admitting guilt) he had been wrongly accused and reinstated his account. Did they offer him any kind of make-good for the three weeks worth of commissions he lost? HELL NO!!  But here's the REAL kicker; A few days after his ePN account was reinstated, he got another email from ePN telling him he was terminated because... wait for it... HE WAS ASSOCIATED WITH A PREVIOUSLY TERMINATED ACCOUNT!! You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what happened here. Of course, he replied to the email with his suspicion that the so-called "previously terminated account" was actually his own and they reinstated his account again within a couple of days.  IMO, one of two things is going on here. Either ePN is hiring recent graduates of narcotics anonymous, or they have some automated fraud software set up to automatically suspend or terminate flagged accounts without doing any kind of human review. Either way, it shows just how little regard ePN has for affiliates.

Example 2) Shortly before ePN's change to the new QCP payout method took effect on October 1st, 2009, PepperJam announced that it was going to discontinue it's relationship with ePN.  All the eBay affiliates using PepperJam had to scramble to move their accounts and campaigns over to ePN's in-house system. For several ex-PJ affiliates with a relative high-volume of daily clicks, the change-over falsely triggered some previously unmentioned "click fraud" filter causing their QCP EPC to be zero for all clicks on all campaigns. If this happens to you, don't expect ePN to offer you any kind of "make-good" for the lost commissions. They will only feed you some rhetoric bullshit about how the clicks still count towards your overall QCP score and that will somehow make up for the loss over the long term. Maybe it's time for Steve Hartman to go on FoxNews and face-off with Bill O'Reilly in the "No Spin" zone.

Before I finish this post, I want to touch on monitoring your clicks. Several affiliates have been contacting me claiming that starting October 1st, the number of daily clicks reported on their ePN dashboard has taken a nose-dive. Based on ePN's history of screwing things up and not wanting to fix it until after affiliates start complaining, it would be a really good idea for you to figure out some way to independently monitor the number of clicks you are sending to eBay. I don't have any information that I would consider compelling, but I suspect their so-called "industry standard" bot filter may be working too good and filtering out some legitimate clicks in the process. Think of it like the SPAM filters ISP's like to use. If you turn it up one notch too high, you start losing emails that you wanted along with the SPAM. The only problem is you don't have any control over ePN's filters.

Until next time, remember... You've got to fight to maintain your piece of the affiliate pie!

Most eBay affiliates posting on the various ePN related forums are reporting a net loss for September as compared to their normal EPC. If this trend continues into October when you start getting paid for each clickinstead of a percentage of each sale, you could be looking at a future of getting screwed by ePN. And if ePN sets your QCP EPC at $0.10 or less and it stays there, you'll need to start looking at alternatives to ePN. You could just say you're satisfied with earning $0.06 - $0.08 per click, but with ePN's history, it probably won't be long until you get that infamous Dear John email in the middle of the night giving you the boot for sending poor quality traffic.

One alternative is to switch some of your sites over to another affiliate program, but what about those sites that profile items not easily found anywhere else except eBay?  I say, "No problem!"  Just place a big fat AdSense 250 x 250 ad on top of all those eBay listings. In fact, you should place two 250 x 250 AdSense ads next too each other on top of the eBay listings. Then if you have room in your sidebar or at the bottom, place a Chitika ad there as well. The screen-shot below has been squeezed down to fit here, but it still gives you a good example of what I'm talking about. The text has been blotted out to pretect the privacy of the ePN affiliate I stole the screen-shot from.

250x250 Twin Adsense Ads

On July 20th of this year (2009), ePN announced several new rules and several updated rules that eBay Partner Network affiliates have to comply with by August 1st., 2009. As if ePN affiliates needed more rules. ePN already has more arbitrary rules than California has laws! Not to mention that most affiliates would have to spend hundreds of dollars in legal fees to try and understand the legalize used in the current Terms of Service (TOS) and Code of Conduct (COC).

One of the rule changes that is adversely effecting many affiliates is the one making it clear that anyone using a trademarked brand name in their domain name will be terminated and all their pending commissions will be reversed and forfeited. Every savvy Internet marketer knows that having the product name in your domain name gives you a tremendous SEO boost, but apparently, eBay is taking it upon themselves to proactively police the Internet on behalf of trademark owners who may, or may not, care about that particular brand name. Let's get real here. Does anyone think that Mattel cares about someone using the name "Chatty Cathy" in their domain name? They haven't used the name themselves in over 40 years! It isn't a trademark violation if the owner doesn't care. Ask any cop; Trespassing isn't trespassing unless the property owner complains. And even if the property owner does complain, the cops don't show up and just shoot you. They give you a warning first.

Just like with Google Adsense, ePN's current Terms of Service indemnifies them from any misconduct on your part. In fact, the AdSense TOS doesn't even mention trademark or copyright violations. There is only section 4 where you agree they are not liable for any of the content on your Web site. So the proactive zero-tolerance approach ePN seems to be taking on this issue is obviously just another way to grab even more control over your personal property (Web site) and micro-manage everything you do.

So, what do you do with your domain names that no longer comply with ePN's Code of Conduct? Well, it's kind of a rock and a hard place scenerio. Not doing anything will get your ePN account terminated and buying a domain name that does comply and doing a 301 redirect will kill your search engine ranking, so you will probably lose commissions either way. I suggest you convert the site over to promoting Google AdSense using the technique described on my home page. You may not make as much with the site as you did promoting eBay items, but if you do it right, you will make a reasonable amount that you can be happy with.

Actually, it's pretty easy if you plan it right. As of right now, I have 92 active affiliate niche sites that I easily manage from my main hosting account. They all have their own domain name and they all promote a very tight affiliate niche for either eBay, Amazon, Google, CJ or one of the many smaller affiliate programs that I belong too. Virtually all these sites use self-updating RSS feeds and require very little maintenance or attention from me. I like to use the "Showtime Grill" method; Just set it and forget it! Now I have more personal time and more money then I ever had working for the state as a forensic psychologist.

To host multiple sites, all you need is one $10.00 a month MASTER hosting account with a primary domain name, unlimited bandwidth and the ability to have an unlimited number of "add-on" domains. My primary domain name is -themilitantaffiliate.com and I have all my other domain names stored in different folders on the same hosting account. When someone clicks a Google listing going to one of my other domains, they are automatically taken to the assigned folder on my main hosting account without ever realizing it.

Hosting Tip: To save a lot of money over the course of the year, I use two different hosting services. My main hosting account is with HostGator because HostGator is a fast, reliable and affordable host with all the features I need, but GoDaddy sells add-on domain names much cheaper than HostGator does. Keeping my domain registrations at GoDaddy and my sites on HostGator isn't complicated. I just tell GoDaddy to "point" the add-on domain name at my HostGator account and the rest is automatic.

I'm going to show you how to make a small alteration to your phpBay Pro affiliate script that will allow you to keep using all your eBay niche sites just as you were before ePN terminated you. Except now you will use phpBay Pro to promote your AdSense listings instead of eBay! This technique won't work with other RSS parsing affiliate software, so if you've been using BANS, or some other eBay affiliate script, you need to buy a copy of phpBay Pro right now!  It won't cost you near as much as letting all those niche sites go to waste! This trick will work with either the Wordpress or API version of phpBay Pro , but not with phpBay Lite.

But before we get into salvaging your sites from ePN's foolishness, let's take a moment to calm down and watch this YouTube video which clearly shows you are not the only one having trouble with ePN.

When you're done laughing, create a page on your site with 2 or 3 (no more then 3) Google AdSense ads. Give the page a name like "noepn.html" and save it to your server.  Now, open your phpBay Pro "auction.php" file in a HTML or text editor and scroll all the way down to the bottom. At the bottom of the file you will see php code that looks like the example below:

***Begin Example***

switch ($i["aff"]) {
case "afepn":
$url = "http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/" . $rover["rid"] . "/1?campid=" . $i["pid"] . "&customid=" . $i["cid"] . "&toolid=10005&mpre=http%3A%2F%2F" . $rover["url"] . "%2F" . $i["title"] . "_W0QQitemZ" . $i["item"] . "QQcmdZViewItemQQssPageNameZRSS%3AB%3ASRCH%3A" . $rover["abbr"] . "%3A101";
break;

***End Example***

Replace this group of code with the example below:

***Begin Example***

switch ($i["aff"]) {
case "afepn":
$url = "noepn.html";
break;

***End Example***

There will be four (4) more instances of code starting with $url = under the one you just altered. Make the same change to all of those instances too. This way, if your site visitor changes countries, the redirect will still work. Of course, you can use a file name other then "noepn.html" if you want. Also, make sure you back up your original auction.php file and only make changes to a copy.

Now, open your config.php file and make sure you have SEO URLs turned ON. Then change your ePN campaign ID to any fake 10 digit number. 1234567890 will do just fine. Upload both files to the correct folders on your site.

Go view your site with all those SEO enriching eBay listings still bringing you in several shoppers every day. Move your mouse over a link and see where it shows something like "...mysite/item-ebay-listing-title.html" in the browser status bar. But now, when you click on one of those eBay listings, you will go to the "noepn.html" page on your site instead of going to eBay and all you will will see is maybe a short message that says something like, "Please excuse the inconvenience. We cannot take you to eBay at this time," along with your AdSense ads and maybe even a Google AdSense search box.

What do you think your site visitor is going to do at this point??  About 70% of them will either click a Google ad or start using the AdSense search box you so thoughtfully provided them. Be careful not to violate the Google AdSense Terms of Service here. You can't use any text of graphic that tells or asks anyone to click a Google Ad. But don't worry, most of them will figure it out on their own.

Tip: If you are using a Google Adsense search box, make sure you design it to show the Google results on YOUR site and also place a search box on the top of all your pages for those people who wouldn't click a eBay listing in the first place. It will reduce your bounce rate. I'm not saying this will raise your AdSense commissions enough to make up for losing the eBay commissions, but it will definitely cause your AdSense earnings to go up enough to justify keeping the sites going.

I hope this article helps you and I invite you to read the rest of this site to learn how you can use your phpBay Pro to promote independent affiliate programs who will treat you with a lot more respect than eBay did.

Sincerely,

The Militant Affiliate.