As many of you may know, eBay recently severed their longstanding affiliate relationship with Commission Junction (as in it ended Saturday). Out of this came a few things:

1) Ebay launched its own affiliate network to bring their affiliate program ‘in house’.

2) Many of the ebay affiliates have been complaining ever since then (April 1) that their conversion rate is lower. (Of course, I doubt that any affiliates that are making more money with EPN are talking much.. so it’s a one-sided conversation).

3) This weekend PepperJam announced that they are going to partner with eBay to help manage their affiliate program.

What this means:

The Pepperjam program has higher commisions which is exceptionally cool.  Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any mention of how or if the RSS or other API functionality of the listings will be able to be transferred over to the Pepperjam side or if that will remain in EPN’s court. I’m actually quite surprised that I haven’t seen this addressed anywhere as most people usually use ebay to promote specific items and there are currently only banners and text links with no deep links allowed.

Granted, it’s monday morning at 6am two days after the announcement, I might be getting ahead of myself a little bit here :) .

Pepperjam’s commissions on ebay fees starts at 52.5% of FVFs and $26.00 for new sign ups. I’ve also seen Kris Jones (the owner) mention in a few forums that if the volume you can drive is high enough you might even be able to squeeze just a bit more out of them (Think 5k a month plus at a bare minimum I would say)

The Verdict: I think this move is pretty painful for Commission Junction, a sign that eBay doesn’t know what it wants (what’s new?), and it really puts PepperJam in the driver seat on this deal.

Nice Job Kris, way to go on landing that whale.

If you want to take a look at the new program, head over to Pepperjam and sign up. If you have trouble getting accepted let me know and I’ll talk to my affiliate manager.