I’ve noticed a lot of curiosity on the Forums lately about how commissions actually work with eBay and Amazon.

I’ll cover each Affiliate Program in separate posts so as not to get them confused and to let everyone in on how it all works.

The eBay Commission Process

  1. A visitor to your lens clicks on an ebay affiliate link. It will look something like this in your Stats Page:ebay Rover Link
  2. When a user clicks on this link, a cookie is placed in their browser.
  3. This cookie is good for 7 days or until that visitor clicks on another eBay affiliate link somewhere else, overwriting yours.
  4. For the duration of the cookie, any item that that the visitor places a bid on and wins will generate a commission for you.
    1. The bid needs to be placed while the cookie is there, but the item can end after the cookie expires.

Payouts

eBay pays out 50-75% of the auction fees they generate from referrals as well as $25-$35 per new sign up. Squidoo has not announced what tier they are in or if Lensmasters are paid out based on the lowest tier. Eventually, when eBay reporting is installed, it will be easier to track this.