Please make sure you get v1.22 if you have not already (use download link on left). I made a “small” ommission in v1.21 which meant that Sign up and “Search eBay” links were not forwarding properly (well, not at all in fact). This is fixed now.

Sorry these updates are so haphazard - it’s what happens when I only have one day to work on WordBay and I try to rush things. Hope you will now be up and running, with all the recent bugs ironed out and a couple of little new features. But if you see anything untoward happening I just know you will let me know!

There was an odd little quirk where links were appearing that were in the format cgi.ebay.com and not the rover.ebay… affiliate link type. This would happen if a campaign ID had not been specified - the feed API would return non-affiliate, “cgi” links, as was the case with the user who complained of this. But I managed to reproduce the problem too a couple of times and can’t work out why, since the site I tested on DOES have the campaign ID specified. Right now I am still at little jumpy because of the click tracking problems some people were reporting and that eBay partly admitted to, so I would like to keep an eye on that. If you see links on your product listings forwarding to a short link like http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=370325891590 instead of the longer http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?… etc. then let me and other users know as it could be important!

Posted on February 24th, 2010 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized | 17 Comments »

There is some concern from users about the possibility that WordBay IS affected by the recent Great RSS Change, despite my relative confidence that it was not. This includes Dennis’ report that earnings from specifically WordBay campaigns are down as compared to others scripts. Of course, if there is an issue I want to resolve it, this affects my earnings too, after all! I can confirm a definite plunge in earnings after around the 11th February 2010, and a seeming general downward trend in clicks too. However, to be honest, that is not the first time that has happened since QCP, know what I mean?

To recap the Great RSS Change, eBay (see their blog post here) have slightly changed the form of the “rover” links generated by the RSS feed from this old form:
http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/707-53477-19255-0/1?campid=xxxxxxxxxx&customid=&toolid=10005&
mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.ebay.de%2FElmo-Elchmeter-Bpz-Magicsport-Magic-Sport-2-2008-TOP_
W0QQitemZ220551167382QQcmdZViewItemQQssPageNameZRSS%3AB%3ASRCH%3ADE%3A102

…to this new form:
http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=2&toolid=10005&campid=xxxxxxxxxx
&customid=&icep_item=350310730839&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=238401&kwid=9020
99&mtid=824&kw=rss

We don’t need to go into the nitty-gritty of these links, you can see that the “new” form doesn’t have that garbled code on the end, but a set of parameters like icep_vectorid=238401, kwid=902099 etc. eBay have not really explained what these are for, they appear to be for some future expansion. However, you can see that the parameter campid=xxxxxxxxxx remains the same, that is the important one that tracks your sales (or should do). By the way, the difference between the two codes 707-53477-19255-0 and 711-53200-19255-0 is immaterial - the former is the code for Germany (you can also see the link cgi.ebay.de within the first link), the latter is the code for US, they were just being sloppy in their example. I mean, if you are going to show the difference between the old and new style links then use the same parameters! I will show that this is not important in my real-life example below.

But the point is this, that the only eBay RSS scripts affected by this change were those actually manipulating the old style link in order to “cloak” it. WordBay merely “base64 encodes” (a completely non-destructive form of encoding) the link exactly as received from the RSS feed, with the exception that it replaces the words “rover” and “ebay” with “buy” and “cheap” (but then changes them back again before clicking through). I will consider removing even these simple forms of cloaking if these concerns continue, particularly this latter one, where I can now see some possible situations where it might go wrong. However, again, this is not related to changes to the RSS, this feature has been present since the very first version of WordBay and would have reared its head anyway, and would only have caused the problem I am thinking of in a very few cases.

WordBay versus link generator

But I wanted to be sure, so I did a little experiment to make sure WordBay is producing its links correctly, so I created a feed within the EPN RSS Generator, and then created exactly the same feed with WordBay, and compared the uncoded links. And here are the results:

Link produced by feed from RSS Generator (UK):

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/710-53481-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=2&toolid=10005&campid=xxxxxxxxxx&customid=test&icep_item=230430578964&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=238431&kwid=902099&mtid=824&kw=rss

and now the link produced by WordBay with the same parameters, for UK:

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/710-53481-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=2&toolid=10005&campid=xxxxxxxxxx&customid=test&icep_item=230430578964&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=238431&kwid=902099&mtid=824&kw=rss

I have pored over these but cannot see any difference…

However, some people also mentioned (and discussions on the EPN forum and blog have suggested this) that this may be a country-related issue. So just in case, I did this with US too, with two identical sets of parameters:

Link produced by feed from RSS Generator (US):

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=2&toolid=10005&campid=xxxxxxxxxx&customid=test&icep_item=190373520609&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=238401&kwid=902099&mtid=824&kw=rss

and now the link produced by WordBay with the same parameters, for US:

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=2&toolid=10005&campid=xxxxxxxxxx&customid=test&icep_item=190373520609&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=238401&kwid=902099&mtid=824&kw=rss

Again, identical… Just for good measure, I made sure the encoded and decoded link, the one that actually gets followed to eBay, was OK:

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=2&toolid=10005&campid=xxxxxxxxxx&customid=test&icep_item=190373520609&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=238401&kwid=902099&mtid=824&kw=rss

Once again, the link produced by the RSS Generator and by WordBay appear identical.

Conclusion

People, I spent an hour or two more on this and I don’t know what more I can do - I hear your concerns, but if this is a problem with WordBay and RSS then I haven’t found it this way either. Quite simply, WordBay is sending your visitors where they are supposed be going, using the exact same link that eBay’s own RSS generator is producing. Could it be that the fall in WordBay-specific earnings is a fluke? Or else Google slapping those sites (which it is very good at doing)? Or else it’s eBay bugs under the mysterious QCP once again depriving us of earnings.

If you have ANY report of this problem, please let me know in the comments. If we can build up a picture of when this might be happening, perhaps we can narrow down the problem and solve it, if indeed it can be solved from the WordBay end. Thanks for your continued input.

Posted on February 21st, 2010 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized | 15 Comments »

Thanks to all the users who have flagged up problems with WordBay (and other eBay RSS-based software) caused by changes to the eBay RSS feed. I am sorry I did not get to grips with this sooner - it seemed to me initially that the problems were not affecting WordBay, but on further investigation there are some strange behaviours. Most notably, links to eBay items do not take you to the item itself but to an eBay login screen, which obviously significantly reduces the chances of sales (though strangely, my sales don’t seem affected that much). This appears to be due to some kind of change in the structure of the so-called “rover” links produced by the RSS feed, in turn maybe caused by a change to the RSS call itself.

I need to look into this ASAP and get it fixed - I hope it is not a complicated issue that would mean major changes, and that it will be a matter of a day or two. So please hold tight and sorry once again that this was not fixed sooner.

Problem with countries.txt file?

One user has also complained of a problem with WordBay not finding the countries.txt file (giving a 403 error) and preventing the countries being displayed in the drop-down lists in the admin panel (the countries.txt file simply contains a delimited list of all the country names). This is an issue entirely unrelated to that of the RSS feed, I am pretty sure of that, but if anyone else has had this problem please let me know. It sounds to me like the file might either be missing or have the wrong file permissions (no read permissions), but it could be some other issue relating to server configuration which I cannot really fix on an individual basis. This might only relate to v1.16 which I put out a few days ago specifically to deal with how WordBay figures out the path to the countries.txt file. The plugin now gets the path “properly”, i.e. the valid Wordpress way, so there should not be a problem as Wordpress uses these same functions internally too.As a “first resort” please do check that the countries.txt is actually present in your wp-content/plugins/wordbay directory. And make sure the plugin is installed to that directory too!

Back with a new version very soon I hope!

Posted on February 18th, 2010 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Your response to this will no doubt depend largely on how your earnings have been affected by EPN’s new QCP system, which officially came on line at the beginning of October. I assume you are up-to-date with these changes - if not, then wander over to the official EPN forum to see what all the fuss is about.

I have kept quiet on the subject so far, but am now interested to hear how WordBay users are faring under the new system. Since our model is very similar I wonder whether there are any similarities in our performance (that’s assuming almost everyone has not suffered under QCP, as the cynical amongst us might be inclined to think) or whether the niche has more influence over our performance under QCP than the business model.

My experience so far

Here is a summary of what I have seen with QPC since the preview earnings appeared on August 18th. I am just showing figures for US eBay as my earnings with other programs are far less. Bear in mind I am paid in pounds sterling, so multiply my EPC by about 1.6 to get USD (at time of writing and rock-bottom pound!)

August seemed positive as it turned out my real EPC was pretty appalling - 0.01 GBP - and QCP was set to almost double my earnings, at least for that part of August, as it was showing an overall QCP EPC of 0.02, though I now realise this was pretty dire still. I have never been a big EPC-watcher (hey, who cares, as long as I am earning a few shekels every month, right?) but I now see that my EPC has been averaging about 0.03 GBP since EPN began.

Weird things noticed: strange patterns in QCP EPC over August, with almost all campaigns showing the same EPC for any given day, but varying over the month, so that EPC was a high as 0.04 some days, but ended August on 0.01 again for all campaigns. Now how can that be possible? Surely QCP is calculated on a per campaign basis! So how can all my campaigns show the same EPC on a given day, including my “generosity” campaign, which lumps together earnings from all “generous” users of WordBay who share revenue with me and operate an extremely diverse range of niche sites which cannot all be performing the same!

One theory was that this is the “pooling” effect, whereby small publishers are lumped together and given a default EPC which could display this behaviour, but I soon found out that a small publisher is defined as having an average of 20 clicks or less per day and I certainly have a BIT more than that (though not exponentially more)!

Still, I could handle my earnings doubling under QCP, was my overall assessment!

September

Started off with a terrible EPC of 0.01, but gradually rose until I had a couple of days with 0.08 and 0.09, i.e. about $0.14 USD - FAR more respectable - but then things slid back to 0.02 by the last day of the month, giving me an average of 0.04, as compared to a “real” EPC of 0.05 (strange improvement there in my actual EPC). So I was only going to be down 15% or so, I could still live with that. However, the strange pattern of consistent daily EPC across campaigns continued, and no explanation has been forthcoming on the EPN forums, despite a number of other publishers reporting the same effect.

October

QCP is live! What is going to happen, we wonder. It would be nice to see mostly those 0.08 days happening but… what do you know? EPC has kicked off at 0.02 and just peaked at 0.03 the first few days of October, dropped back to 0.01 and I have a sinking feeling… Whatever the explanation for those big paying days, it seems that a maximum of 0.03 EPC is going to be the order of the day for me under QCP. Downloading the transaction reports (make sure you download the All Events one), I see that this is considerably less than I would have earned, with a number of good-paying Winning Bids starting the month off. The most I can hope is that these will translate to an improved EPC later in the month…

So what now?

Well, the jury is still out on QCP for me. I can wait a few more months to see where this is really going but I am not entirely optimistic. Yes, like most EPN publishers I think the system is unfair, untransparent and ultimately less rewarding for many (most?) publishers. EPN WAS a very generous affiliate program, I must admit - easily my best earner and one of the highest-paying out there. I imagine eBay were getting robbed blind by black-hatters gaming the ACRU system and probably there has been a very common-sense business decision behind the introduction of the new system - simply put, they were probably paying out too much to affiliates and not seeing the best return, and this is their way of taking control of this, and in a way, one can’t blame them for this.

However, what will grate with many of us is the lack of transparency and the disconnect between the sales we are bringing in and what EPN is actually paying us. Ultimately many of us will NOT be encouraged to invest further in trying to figure out what on earth is being asked of us with QCP, and we will vote with our feet - frankly I can make a lot more than 0.03 EPC from good old Adsense, without standing on my head trying to figure out QCP…

What now for WordBay?

It DOES seem that the business model of sites using WordBay (which is pretty similar whatever the niche, let’s face it) does not bring in the mysterious “quality” that eBay is looking for, though maybe you will set me straight. I am surprised at this. The visitor Googles for “buy antique Persian love-god figurines”, comes to your site, clicks the exact item they are interested in, bids for this item on eBay soon after clicking through… Surely this is “quality”, as opposed to sending random potential customers through banner links? From my results it seems not…

So I have to apologise to all those who are waiting for me to add their favourite feature to WB, or to correct their favourite bug (I know, I know, there are a few emails and comments I have not responded to) - until I see what is going to happen with my EPN earnings in the next few months I am really not motivated to invest time in WordBay. At the moment Wordbay seems to work fine, with no major bugs, and no changes I introduce now are likely to affect QCP EPC greatly (well, what does affect it, we wonder…), so I hope you can live with that for now.

On the plus side, I am looking into what I could adapt Wordbay for - something similar could be written to work with Commission Junction, Amazon, or a host of other affiliate programs which offer web services. But it would take a bit of work, and I would have to find a way to monetise it, otherwise I cannot justify the work put in - especially not with a baby due very soon and the budget about to get a whole lot tighter! My wild coding days are over, I fear!

I would love to hear your experiences so far with QCP, your moans and gripes, your amazing success stories, and your ideas of how we as small-time niche-site owners can survive this and perhaps take the Wordbay idea somewhere else, where it will earn us enough to keep us in Persian love-god figurines for many years to come!

Posted on October 5th, 2009 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

OK, sorry to all of you (and thanks for letting me know) who got version 1.1 of WordBay only to discover that it did not work as advertised, i.e. did not preserve your lovingly-crafted WordBay.css file. This happened due to an oversight on my part: when using the Wordpress automatic plugin update in the backend, Wordpress deletes the contents of the plugin directory before installing the new one, thus leaving no CSS file to preserve! The CSS file would only be preserved if you installed manually, but obviously a great number of users will be relying on the automatic plugin update feature so I have completely rewritten that feature now so as to store the file in the WordPress database, which means that your css file is now edited in the backend (which is starting to look very cluttered). One proviso straight away:

The first time you install this new version, you still need to back up your WordBay.css file first! Keep it safe somewhere! Unfortunately, I cannot stop Wordpress deleting it if you update automatically.

Also, I realised from a user bug report that this version of the plugin will unfortunately not work with PHP4 - sorry guys, it’s really time to upgrade to PHP5 if at all possible (may be as simple as choosing PHP5 in your hosting control panel, though make sure all your sites work after!). It’s not really practical to keep providing back-compatibility with earlier versions of PHP - I am suprised that something like this has not happened sooner. If you get a failure like “Call to undefined function: file_put_contents() in…” that’s what that is. If you can’t upgrade to PHP5 then I suggest rolling back to WordBay v1.05 and sticking with it until you can upgrade PHP…

Instructions

1) You HAVE backed up your existing WordBay.css file, right?!

2) Update the plugin either automatically or manually. If you do it manually, you can skip the next step, since your old WordBay.css will still be in the plugin directory.

3) Copy your backed-up WordBay.css file into the wordbay plugin directory if necessary.

4) NOW, when you go into the WordBay settings in your admin backend, you will see, near the bottom, an area where you can edit your CSS file. From now on, do not edit the WordBay.css file directly - use the back-end, otherwise your changes will just be overwritten the next time you change any WordBay settings.

The plugin checks all the scenarios I could think of:

- there is no existing WordBay.css file (for some reason) and you were using a version prior to v1.1 thus none was saved to memory: a new WordBay.css file will be created using the Wordbay.css.default file

- there is an existing WordBay.css file (that you either copied in from a backup or was left after a manual update): this file will be used and again, you should edit it in the back-end from now on

- (and this is the bit we all want to work properly now!) there is no existing WordBay.css file because it got overwritten by the automatic update, but you had been using v1.15 (this new version) or above, and so the WordBay.css file was stored in the Wordpress database and is lovingly restored as soon as you go into the backend. Yes, for now you WILL have to pay the backend a visit every time you update - all these checks are done by the backend not by the plugin frontend - I didn’t really want the plugin bogged down with all these checks every time the plugin cycles, though I’m sure there would be a simple way to do this.

OK, this was inevitably more complicated than I expected so please let me know how things work - I have tested it quite extensively, but I know you guys can always find some scenario I didn’t plan for! And of course, this feature only really comes into its own once I put out a NEW version of WordBay, but you can try it out by maybe uninstalling WordBay and reinstalling it if you want.

Let me know how you get on.

Posted on August 25th, 2009 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized | 11 Comments »