EPN Announces ACRU Tiers

Let me start by saying I'm very, very excited about the new program eBay Partner Network will be putting into place, which will promote quality registrations and help weed out the thin affiliates.  Their plan, which will effect new signups but not existing EPN members until November 1st, is to not pay a flat $25 for all ACRU's in the US.  Instead, EPN will give payouts at the end of the month based on the quality of traffic sent and how eBay views the new registration, in terms of longevity and potential revenue to eBay.  If you derive most of your EPN affiliate revenue from winning bids, then this won't really effect you because those tiers are not changing, only ACRUs.

The tiers for the new ACRU system is wide and I mean wide, meaning that you could earn as little as a dollar for sending crap traffic or as much as $50!  I'm hoping to be at the latter end of the scale, since repeatedly my new signups purchase multiple items throughout the eBay cookie length.

To aid in the shock of this new system EPN will be providing parrallel stats until November 1st which will show you what affiliates would be making and will be making on the new system.  However, actual payouts on the new tier ACRU will only take effect in November, so if you are a thin affiliate sending craptastic traffic it will give you an opportunity to bail out and find something else.  On the flip side, it'll be hard to stomach those bigger numbers when you know you can't get them till later on in the year.

Big Question

There is still talk that EPN is having trouble tracking ACRUs and even winning bids and on a large scale if you believe the official EPN forums.  Will they be able to accurately track this new level of data?  I would expect some serious discussions going on between now and November 1st, most likely very heated discussions.

It was just last month that eBay announced that they would be hiring an outside firm to help test EPN tracking.  Would be nice if they would at least publish these results fix or state things are running smooth before rolling out a completely new revenue system.  But, I'm just a worker bee, not a thinker bee.

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Programs I use to generate EPN ACRUs are phpBay and Build A Niche Store. Two great scripts that I highly recommend to any affiliate marketer new or experienced with eBay.

August 1, 2008 · Filed Under Making Money

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ACRU TO CRU Ratio

Yes, I'm on an EPN kick this month and with good reason, since it's currently one of my leading earners in the affiliate realm.  I'm getting a pretty decent number of bids, considering the limited traffic I'm pulling in, but what I feel I'm struggling with is converting CRU's(When a new user registers to ebay) to ACRU's(when said new user makes a winning bid or BIN).

Below are my stats so far in May:

CRU ACRU Bids Winning Bids

10                    4                       158                       56

Keep in mind that I'm not selling low priced items, so even at 56 winning bids my EPN earnings are fairly high. ;)  I guess I'm just greedy for those $25 ACRU's, but they are just not converting.  Hopefully as the cookie carries over for the 30 days it will give them an opportunity to win one of the other 102 bids that were placed so I get that commission and ACRU commission.

Is anyone else having similar issues in the month of May?

May 30, 2008 · Filed Under Making Money

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