eBay to share more revenue starting next month, but on a condition

Techcrunch reports that ebay is all set to pay out twice as much in affiliate commissions to smaller affiliates and the number going even further upwards for larger affiliates, starting June 1.

However, with the increased payouts, eBay has also published new Ts and Cs stating that search marketers may no longer send PPC traffic directly to eBay. Affiliates will need to build landing pages to eBay via which they may route their paid search traffic.

The Terms and Conditions will include this new clause:

a. Search Engines. You will not be compensated for paid search traffic purchased from Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, nor from any of their content networks, such as Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, and MSN ContentAds, if it is linked directly to the eBay.com, eBay Express, or eBay Store domains (not “Commission Earning Activity”). The change in policy is limited to the eBay.com US program, and to the three search engines stated above. Linking to a non eBay domain is allowed.

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New Inline Video ads on YouTube

GigaOm network’s NewTeeVee.com is reporting about a new format of video ads being tested on Youtube in what seems to be the best and smartest effort in monetizing the video sharing social network since Google acquired it.

As can be seen in this screen shot, a text ad is placed below a playing video which can be clicked to pause the playing video and play the video advertisement. The good thing is, viewing the ad is solely the user’s discretion and the ad can also be played once the video has been entirely watched.

I can not see the ads here yet, I am guessing that they may either be geo-targeted or google might just be testing them for now.

NewTeeVee also notes that ads are not displayed when a youtube video is embedded to a web page outside of youtube.

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Coupon Affiliates - now on twitter!

Just stumbled across the twitter profile of DealTwit. A Coupon code microblog on twitter that regularly twitters coupon codes from e-retail merchants - one can ask for a specific merchant’s coupon code by sending a direct twitter and DealTwit promises to respond.

Dealtwit is the second “revenue” twitter microblog I have seen, the first being Twitterlit - who is “Twittering the first lines of books so you don’t have to”.

Smart affiliates have finally begun monetizing twitter, and they are doing it in very creative ways. This is good stuff, Affiliate marketing 2.0.

I’m not sure how much success this can be, Dealtwit only has 17 followers as of now, Twitterlit, on the other hand, has as many as 109 followers, both have taken the right step in a direction. These guys are branding themselves. The days of anonymously marketing merchants are going away as more and more affiliates realize the importance of building a brand and eventually monetizing it.

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Tweets for the day

I’m addicted to twitter, and today’s post will be twitter style, a few “tweets” in this post. Each less than 140 characters.

• More affiliate programs starting affiliate blogs every day - the latest is Kodak - http://kodakaffiliate.blogspot.com
• Ebay to roll out a brand new feedback system - http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m04/i26/s01
• Affiliate marketing jagron - http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk/glossary-of-affiliate-marketing-terms/
• [social network] Web 2.0 site lets users send virtual scratch cards -
• http://www.prweb.com//releases/web2-0/sweepstakes/prweb522060.htm
• The Google reader theme is very cool!
• New BumpZee! Features
• Top 10 reasons why web 2.0 sucks

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Mahatma Gandhi on Customer Service

I was on the Zoho website just now and for some reason clicked the About us link, where I found this awesome quote by the Mahatma - hehe, he said what any true Gujarati would!:

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises.

He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him.

He is not an interruption in our work - he is the purpose of it.

We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to serve him.

- Mahatma Gandhi

This must have been said back in the early 20th century, but in 2007 and beyond, customer service is the one thing that can make or break a business, especially relevent to the industry I frequently blog about (and belong to) - e-retail.

BTW, the Zappos story comes to mind every time I think about customer service in e-retail - I was doing a price comparison for shoe sites, and found out that for the most part, Zappos is pricing it’s shoes at the maximum they are sold online, and yet, they sell more shoes than anybody else; Customers keep flocking to zappos and I very strongly suspect that the primary reason behind the success of the company is the importance they give to providing A grade customer support (Heck, 65% of those of shop there, at any given day are repeat customers!).

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Are you (time) rich or (time) poor?

Fantastic article on the Lightspeed venture partners’ blog.

Categorizes Internet users in two categories, the “Time rich” and the “TIme poor”.

I’d speculate that many of the readers of this blog fall into the Time Poor category, but the vast majority of internet users fall into the Time Rich category. If you’re starting a new internet company, its important to know who your audience is, and to make sure that you don’t let your own experience and that of other Time Poor people guide you wrong.

Rest of the article here …

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Over two million people use StumbleUpon

According to this press release, StumbleUpon is now over two million users strong.

I’ve been reading many bloggers write about how stumbleupon makes up such an important share of their traffic referrers pie.

It’s too bad I haven’t been active at stumbleupon yet - hopefully, this piece of news is enough inspiration for me to go and check out the service and make some use of it’s mammoth potential as a source of traffic.

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Social Marketing - web 0.0

I was reading iCon, a Steve Jobs biography, have only read the first few pages yet, but having already read so much about apple - something passed my mind that I guess is worth sharing here.

There is all this hype over social media, and social networks etc., as if it is the one true way to successful business and brand-development. The way most people are taking this, is they are taking niches and turning them into communities and social networks.

What Apple did, however (and Sony, and BMW, and Reliance and even Microsoft to a certain extent), is that they carried on their business the traditional way, yet they were heavily engaged in what can be noted as “Social marketing”.

How exactly they did this, I am yet to grasp an understanding of, but they did not host social networks, that’s a certain fact.

Let me end this post with a Guruish comment:

Social marketing is not hosting a social network, nor creating one, it is building a sense of community within all those who use your products.

That, IMO is the sure-shot technique of building any business and REAL social marketing - Creating a sense of belonging and passion towards your product in the minds of everyone who uses it, that way, they start bonding with all those who use the same product. This creates a sort of missionary inclination into your users - who try and “convert” more people into using your product.

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Zappos reduces commission - now pays only 12% per sale (down from 15%)

Got this bit of bad news in the email just now

Dear Pranav Chavda,

Thank you for your participation in the Zappos.com affiliate program. We are contacting you to inform you of an upcoming change in the commission rate within the Zappos Associate program. Please note that new program terms with a payout of 12% will be pushed out 3/19/07. Affiliates will have two weeks to accept the new terms before they automatically become effective 4/1/07. All current performance incentives tiers will remain in place.

As a customer service focused company, we invest a great deal of money into improving the customer experience. The recent introduction of free overnight shipping and the growing product offering are part of that effort. As a result of some of these things, Zappos.com has already seen a 30% increase in affiliate sales over last year. This is great news for everyone. Affiliates will continue to benefit from our growing inventory of quality products and our belief in providing customers the best service possible.

We hope you will remain a valued associate, and continue to develop and monetize your sites effectively to help us create a great user experience. We feel there is tremendous opportunity to increase revenue through the program. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us. We value your input and suggestions.

Sincerely,

Zappos Associate Program
associates@zappos.com

Translation: You sold 30% more zappos shoes this year than last year, As thank you, we would like to give you the gift of a 20% pay-cut.

…Zappos was among my top 5 performers for the past few years now, but I guess I will be paying more attention to promoting Shoebuy (pays 17%), Shoes.com (pays 17.50% to 20%), the mason shoe brands that all pay 15% - all of these have similar EPCs as zappos, smaller inventory but that’s okay - Zappos didn’t have this big an inventory when they started making me money - their conversions have actually dropped since they started focusing on selling items that are not shoes. Might even check out the onlineshoes.com program over at linkshare.

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Browse goods at the Shopwave mpire

“visual shopping” web-apps are mushrooming around the web; with a hope to offer a better and more unique shopping experience to online buyers (and make money in the process too).

Browsegoods, for example and lets users browse products on amazon as if they were browsing a map on google maps - you can zoom in and out of product category maps. The more you zoom in, the more products you get to see, once you have decided upon a product, zoom into the product to see more information about it. Very interesting concept, if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth a look.

Other visual shopping apps worthy of a mention include BlackDogAir (lets shoppers browse through Books movies and music as if they were browsing a windows explorer window for files) and of course the already popular Like.com that recognizes stuff people are wearing in photos and displays similar products available to buy on various stores in their database (which, it seems is populated with datafeeds from affiliate networks etc.).

Today, yet another “Visual shopping experience” has launched, this time built on top of the shopping.com API, from the labs of mpire, called Shopwave.

(more…)

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