Woody Hayday

Those of you that make good money out of eBay probably noticed the downtime last month. For me it had an affect on my epn earnings for around 5 days. The problem (in my case at least) seemed to be with RSS feeds called from php (curl.) But it could simply have been a server capacity issue as while my earnings/epc/clicks were down they were probably only 75% down, which would indicate intermittent service. Its worth noting that before this I had had upwards of 2 years of service as an eBay affiliate without a single obvious days downtime with regards to their rss feeds. This certainly softened the blow of the 5 days loss, but it does make you consider caching and things like the auction 2 post plugin more as I had become so reliant on the wonderful ebay affiliate uptime that I had almost no backup plan. A lot of my sites were actually showing comical messages I had left in the php because it was that infrequent that this sort of loss of service would occur (only a few sites and it just said something like “oh knowz we cant find anything” – yeah I know, I don’t even remember writing it.) Either way all was resolved within a working week and everything is  long since back up to capacity again.

Ebay Partner Network responded with a blog post about this yesterday. You wouldn’t blame them if they coldly denied to pay all affiliates for earnings that they effectively didn’t make during the tempremental service, however they look to be providing us with a token possitive sum gesture. This helps epn stand out amongst networks and shows that they acknowledge the shared benefits affiliate promotion offers, certainly it cements epn in the uk as being a solid entrance to affiliate marketing.

“We have finalized calculations for a makegood that will use the earnings on the days before and the days after the outage, along with a factor to account for Christmas seasonality, to calculate a makegood to make up for the decrease in affiliate earnings caused by this outage.

This makegood will be added to each account and will be paid out along with the December payment”

(Taken from the Ebay Partner Network Blog post re the November 21st Site outage Makegood – posted 07th Dec 09.)