So big news this morning, and it’s rippling through the affiliate community at light speed. eBay is leaving Commission Junction and starting it’s own affiliate program. Here is the letter received this morning:

We are excited to announce eBay’s new global affiliate platform: the eBay Partner Network.

The new platform will go live on April 1st, 2008 PST, at which point eBay will no longer be running its affiliate program through Commission Junction. Beginning April 1st, affiliates should register with eBay Partner Network and migrate their links from CJ to the new platform.

While CJ and ValueClick have been valuable partners to eBay throughout the years, we’ve decided to give our affiliate community a customized experience. eBay will continue its partnership with ValueClick’s technology division, Mediaplex, for ad serving, tracking and other custom projects.

All the great tools and benefits of working with the eBay program will remain the same � access to the Editor Kit and affiliate API, the flexible destination tool, the great payout structure. Please note that there will be no changes in the pricing structure as part of this transition. In addition, the eBay Partner Network will provide several new features:

* Easy global registration to multiple countries simultaneously
* New, targeted banners and rich media creatives
* New landing page optimization and geo-targeting capabilities
* More detailed reporting capabilities for eBay’s programs

The eBay Partner Network and Commission Junction will run in parallel for one month through this process, so please plan to complete your migration by May 1st, 2008.

You can receive an additional 5% bonus for all traffic tracked through eBay Partner Network in April 2008 for specific countries (bonus applicable to traffic sent to Half.com and US, UK, Australia, Canada, Italy, India and Spain eBay sites). The sooner you migrate, the more you’ll earn! Just:

* Register with eBay Partner Network on April 1, 2008
* Confirm your registration, and obtain your new identifiers
* Update your links with your new identifiers
* Reminder: Please plan to complete migration by May 1, 2008

Programs that will transition to the new eBay Partner Network platform starting Apr 1st:

* eBay Australia
* eBay Belgium
* eBay Canada
* eBay France
* eBay Hong Kong
* eBay India
* eBay Italy
* eBay Netherlands
* eBay Singapore
* eBay Spain
* eBay United Kingdom
* eBay United States
* Half.com

Programs that will NOT be affected and will continue their relationship with Commission Junction:

* eBay’s Tradera AB
* ProStores
* Reseller Marketplace
* Media Marketplace
* eBay Stores
* StubHub

Please also note that eBay affiliates working with other platforms including Affilinet and TradeDoubler, as well as affiliates to other eBay Inc properties like Skype, Rent.com, PayPal, Kijiji and Shopping.com will not be affected.

More information, including detailed step-by-step instructions on how to migrate existing publishers’ links to the new platform, will be available on April 1st. Please check back with us then.

We’re excited for a successful transition, and the opportunity to grow our affiliates’ businesses through even more innovations, information and communication moving forward!

So what does this mean for us? I’m assuming that rover will remain in place, but PID tracking will change. Will eBay have channel tracking similar to CJ? Hope so. Also, this will hurt a lot of CJ 5 bar earners, since a significant portion of earnings will leave the CJ interface. This will dry my CJ account pretty close to dry, and again enforces the plan to promote other merchants. Another possible issue is tracking and commissions throughout this transition phase. Hopefully, we won’t see any issues here, but eBay is good on the ‘make good’, so that should be okay in the end. Bottomline, people don’t like change.. because it’s scary, and I’m scared.

Here are some good threads discussing this:
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?threadID=2000536449&tstart=0&mod=1205757922901
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?threadID=2000536450&tstart=0&mod=1205762669591
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=756430
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=756407
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=756424

hanji