Questions for eBay Affiliate Program Manager Lily Shen
By Matthew G. Nelson, The ClickZ Network, Feb 5, 2007
Since eBay established its affiliate marketing program in 2001, its network has grown to 50,000 affiliates worldwide, with eBay employees dedicated to managing specific geographic regions and paying out millions a month in rewards for driving eBay sales.
Recently, ClickZ sat down with Lily Shen, senior manager of the program, to discuss its inner workings and the company's plans to drive affiliate sales via phones and even television.
Q. What's the standard profile of an eBay affiliate?
A. It really runs the gamut. We have portals like EarthLink, and one man shops [that] develop application tools or widgets solely focused on driving traffic back to eBay. We have folks who are e-mail affiliates. We have folks that do just paid search; they are bidding on keywords on the major search engines or some of the tier-two search engines, driving traffic back to eBay. We have content sites -- thousands on thousands of sites across various categories and keywords.
The affiliates that are the most successful in our program are the most innovative and the most entrepreneurial. They are at the cutting edge always looking at how eBay's market has evolved.
Q. How much money can an affiliate make in the program?
A. In terms of payouts, we don't provide specific numbers in terms of commission these guys generate. But some of our top affiliates make north of $500,000 to even a million dollars a month. It's $12 million a year for certain affiliates.
Q. Besides driving traffic, does the affiliate program help eBay in other ways?
A. It's a good way for advertisers to try out other marketing vehicles. Obviously, at eBay we do our own paid search and direct marketing, but some of our affiliates are the most innovative guys out there, [including] mobile applications.
Q. As eBay is an auction site, the listings expire regularly, so what exactly are affiliates linking to?
A. A lot of affiliates and developers will use search results. They will say "click here for our PS3s" or something, and instead of linking to one specific item, they can link to an entire search result. They can optimize on soonest ending [auctions] or the cheapest or refine it to keywords that do very well.
We provide them information about products that are selling really well on the site to inform our affiliates about other things that can be driving sales for them. In most cases affiliates are linking to search results and not specific items, but we also have products and tools that provide real-time information and are serving up listings that are live at any point in time. ORDER YOUR NICHE STORE NOW