eBay Tosses MCM to the Curb Like a Bad Sofa

This is kind of the nature of the beast with being an affiliate. You are being compensated for providing them traffic which converts at a substantially lower cost that their predicted lifetime revenue from the customers. If those lines cross, expect to be shown the door as soon as they're made aware of that fact. It is not economical to work with people to optimize their sites to hopefully be sending quality traffic again, since that is hard, non-obvious, might be against the interests or intentions of the site owner, and consumes resources which would be better spent optimizing the customer's own sites.<p>For example, a slight change in your keyword mix coming from Google -- not even a bad thing -- can make your traffic quality as measured downstream go from Great! to Abysmal! very quickly. Pretend that instead of me being both an SEO and a software developer the SEO was the affiliate of the software developer in my business.<p><a href="http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/conversion-rates" rel="nofollow">http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/conversion-rates</a><p>I was "sending" great, great traffic with SEO, until recently. The people who joined the free trial were disposed to convert. If I had been earning 25 cents a trial, both the SEO and the software developer would be pretty happy... until October.<p>What happened in October? Halloween happened. And I did fairly well SEOing for Halloween, and generated a metric truckload of new trial signups and sales... <i>but</i> the traffic is much lower quality than someone coming in for elementary education activities. My consolidated conversion rate took a nosedive, because the conversion rate for people coming from my Halloween sites is below 1%.<p>If I were paying the Halloween-loving SEO 25 cent CPAs at the moment, I'd be bleeding money and probably have to cut him, since I don't have sufficient insight into <i>his</i> business to realize this is a temporary condition and will rectify itself in another few days (right before it happens again at Thanksgiving... and Christmas... and Valentine's Day...).

The real conclusion to me is that you should not base your business on some other big business that gets a major say in whether or not you live or die.<p>Try to gain traction independent of google, ebay, facebook or whatever it out there that you could base your business on. Treat them like the icing on your cake, nice to have but not the crucial element in your bottom line which if you lose it will kill your business overnight.<p>Of course, if it works it is easy money, but once you grow a bit, maybe have a couple of employees it suddenly starts to look like a highwire act.<p>Unless of course you've got an in with some big name VC that also happens to invest in google to protect you from being cut off.<p>Better keep your independence as much as you can.

Im not sure of the rates but my cofounder used to send a decent amount of traffic to ebay through the affiliate system, I actually wrote a fairly complex system in which live auctions were compared to other retailers prices.<p>At some point though the affiliate commission rates went from worth pursuing to not really worth it at all even though we had invested a fair amount of effort in integrating ebay.

I had been a healthy-earning Ebay affiliate for 3 years under the old (Commission Junction) system; after seeing Stewf's success with Mid-Century Modernist, I hired the same developer to build a similar system for Hewn &#38; Hammered (except in my case, it would present the stream of auction items right on the front page, alongside the editorial content). The developer finished, and is going to bill me any minute ... and Ebay just denied my application without any explanation whatsoever, and said they wouldn't accept a second application.<p>(I had to reapply as they've migrated from Commission Junction to their own proprietary system.)<p>I have about 1000 uniques a day and my audience is absolutely well-off, 90% homeowners, interested in collecting Arts &#38; Crafts furniture and the like. They have money to burn and are interesting in buying.<p>Oh well. Thanks for screwing me, Ebay.

I think that a lot of the people who might click on the items featured on MCM could be classed as 'tourists'.<p>I could imagine that many site visitors are attracted to an item, because it's aesthetically pleasing .. and they go ahead and click to view the item, without any intention of making a purchase.<p>If this were the case, I'm sure that it would dilute your QCP score.<p>The items are laid out in a gallery format, and the interface doesn't appear to be solving any specific 'goal-orientated' problems. I think this might be part of the reason the traffic generated has been classified as low-quality.

Damnit, I love MCM. One of the nicest designed sites out there.