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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.
There was a huge hubub a few months ago when the PepperJam Affiliate Network (run by Kris Jones) opened to the public. I signed up early in their release but I wanted to use the system a while before I threw my 0.02 in on the issue.
How does PepperJam stack up?
Dashboard
All of the graphics and interface on the entire program continually blow me away. It’s fast, easy to use, and well presented. The black background takes some people a while to get used to, but I actually enjoy a darker background color in many cases.
Grade: A
Reporting
I notice that clicks and impressions are reported within 2-3 hours very consistently. This is faster than the likes of CJ, but not quite real time. However, I have not had any stats changed or revised either, meaning the reporting is pretty spot on. Real time reporting would be really cool, but this is hard to pull off with product based advertisers I think.
Grade: B+
Offers
Pepperjam opened with something around 100 offers (someone correct me if I’m way off here) and I think they’ve added something like 150 new advertisers since they opened. While not adding advertisers at a rate of 3-5 a day like CJ is, Pepperjam is coming close. There is a very high percentage of exclusive offers, with everything from the Star Wars store to Jelly Belly. They’ve got some very niche products which are cool.
One big drawback is that they have a ton of product based affiliates yet their product feeds leave a little to be desired (get to that in a second). Some affiliates do allow deep linking (where you link to any page on the advertiser’s site) which allows for some cool ideas when building lenses to promote things…
Grade: B
Product Feeds
I’d say less than 20% of the product based affiliates (those that payout as a % of sale) have product feeds on PepperJam. The feed can only be downloaded as a gigantic CSV file instead of by individual advertiser. Many of the product feeds have broken image links. This is probably the weakest part of Pepperjam’s platform and I know it’s something they are planning on improving. Right now, however, it’s hard to use because the data is spotty at best and from limited affiliates.
Grade:C
Communication
PepperJam has a little talk bubble next to each advertiser that lights up whenever the affiliate manager for that program is online. I’ve used this several times to ask questions about payouts, ideas, and lots of other things. It’s absolutely fantastic! I’ve also had nearly all of my direct e-mails returned promptly with personal responses from people that can actually answer my question. This actually let me to come back to PepperJam a bit after not doing much with it the first month.
Grade: A
Payouts
Every program I’ve seen migrate over from Commission Junction to PepperJam has increased their payout by close to 50% or more. In general, their payouts are pretty high, and if you talk to the affiliate managers and tell them about your marketing plans for the advertiser, you may be able to get a little bump. They’ve been very generous so far with increasing payouts on may account for advertisers I do well with.
I haven’t received a bank transfer from PepperJam yet so I can’t comment on that area of the payout cycle.
Grade: A-
Overall
Depending on a few different things, PepperJam could very well evolve to be a bigger part of my affiliate program strategy than Commission Junction currently is. If you haven’t signed up for them yet, they are worth giving a try.
Here is my super sneaky PepperJam sign-up link.
If you have already signed up, what have your experiences been so far? I’m interested to hear from others who have been using PepperJam the last few months.
The big news today was that eBay is leaving Commission Junction and opening up their own independent affiliate network. It has been covered pretty heavily in the blogosphere so I thought I’d try to enlighten everyone a bit as to how it will affect your Squidoo lenses, since there are TONS of lenses out there with eBay listings.
1) The Squidoo eBay module will be fine. Gil stated in the forums today that Squidoo has been working with eBay to make transition as painless as possible. Yay Gil!
2) Your RSS Feeds may need updating. If you are using a version of my Ebay RSS Feed Generator, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered and will be able to automatically update your feeds from my end. If you create your own CJ/eBay RSS feeds, you will need to go back and change each one according to the new links that eBay releases.
The Moral of the story? Use Squidoo’s Ebay feed generator…. or mine :D.
-The Captain
