EBay to take over affiliate program's management

by Juan Carlos Peréz

March 17, 2008 —

EBay will soon take over
management of the affiliate programs for its core marketplace and for its Half.com
site from ValueClick
in the hopes that it can operate them more efficiently.

In early April, EBay will begin to migrate the roughly 100,000 affiliates away
from ValueClick's Commission Junction to the new in-house platform, the company
was due to announce Monday.

One affiliate looking forward to the change is GetItNext,
a search engine for eBay listings that gets a commission every time its visitors
click over to eBay and buy a product.

"ValueClick's Commission Junction does a fairly good job, but the product
over the years has grown a bit stagnant and hasn't been keeping up with the
demands affiliates have had," said Ron Stewart, GetItNext's CEO.

For example, GetItNext routinely has to manually "dig out" data it
feels is essential about its referrals, sales and commissions from the ValueClick
reports, Stewart said.

In addition, the company has encountered data integrity problems with the information
it receives from ValueClick, forcing GetItNext to engage in very time-consuming
data reconciliation efforts, Stewart said.

GetItNext has been beta testing the eBay system and is encouraged by its tests
so far, and in particular by the development road map, which promises a significant
improvement over the ValueClick tools, he said.

From eBay's perspective, a key goal is to establish a closer relationship with
its affiliates, which are an important part of the company's marketing and sales
operation, said Matt Ackley, eBay's vice president of Internet marketing.

By eliminating the inherent latency of having a third party involved in the
process, eBay hopes to be able to more quickly analyze affiliate data and make
more effective decisions about the program, Ackley said.

Migrating to the eBay affiliate platform will involve what Ackley described
as a simple process of swapping listing tags, but how manual or automated the
process is on the affiliates' end will depend on how they have set up their
systems, he said.

GetItNext's Stewart expects the migration will be smooth for his company. "Because
of the way we built the site, changing the parameters will be very simple, with
a slight change of code," Stewart said.

Later this year, eBay might take over other of its affiliate programs that
ValueClick manages, which include the ones for StubHub, ProStores and eBay Stores,
Ackley said.

Affiliates come in a variety of shapes and sizes, including Web publishers
that carry sellers' listings, merchants that market their products on their
own Web sites, Web sites that display eBay banner ads and firms that do e-mail
marketing, he said.

ValueClick, which has managed the eBay and Half.com affiliate programs since
2001, didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.

IDG News Service