Is The ePN Staff Competent?

All ePN (eBay Partner Network) affiliates would sleep better at night if they could believe the ePN staff were all competent professionals. Unfortunately, there is a lot of empirical evidence that suggests otherwise.

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!