I am currently working on making WordBay fully consistent with the different language and country options available through the eBay Partner Network, which it may not have been before. I was as confused as anybody, but I think I have unravelled most of the threads, and can present an explanation of eBay country sites as related to the EPN program, and its use with WordBay - please note though that I will implement the full range of country options in versions post-v0.99.
These are the sites available through the EPN program, and I believe that on application to EPN you would normally tick all of these countries, though I don’t know if it is possible to be accepted for some but rejected for others:
United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, eBay Motors (the latter functions a bit like a country site but is not applied for separately)
These are all fully-functioning (I hope!) in the WordBay options.
Non-EPN eBay sites
However, there are other international eBay sites which are NOT accessible through EPN. So you will not earn any commissions with them if you choose them as options. These eBay sites are also divided into two groups which I’ll explain in a second:
Group 1: Germany, China, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland
Group 2: Malaysia, Taiwan, Philippines, Poland, Sweden
Of these, it is possible that even though you can choose one of these as your default listings site in WordBay, you actually won’t be served any listings. I cannot be sure which these are - I have not managed to get China and Taiwan to work, for example, I don’t even know if they are fully-fledged eBay sites, I include all of these for the sake of completeness and we may remove them at a later date for reasons explained below. These non-EPN countries are shown in brackets in the drop-down option lists in WordBay (in post v0.99 versions).
In addition, Group 2 sites do not even have a so-called “Placement ID” (which I’ve called “referral locale” in WordBay) with which to refer the user to the relevant site, so I have not included these in the referral locale drop-down list in WordBay admin.
Country sites and geotargetting
There is one corollary of this if you are using the geotargetting option in WordBay - have you spotted it?
If you have geo-targetting switched on and you get a visitor coming from a country with a non-EPN site, like Sweden, say, they will be served Swedish eBay listings, but you will not receive any commissions for sales made by eBay. However, this is a small price to pay - do we really hope that a Swedish visitor will go and join US eBay and start buying from there if only we were to serve them US eBay listings? Not worth the worry in my opinion. Unless you REALLY resent eBay earning any money from you without paying you a commission!
More seriously, if someone is visiting from China, or one of the other eBay locations that do not seem to provide a product feed, well… they’ll get an empty page, for now. Again, are you that bothered about this? If so, I will try to think of some way to get around this in future versions, probably simply by eliminating those countries, once we have identified them. If you want to do remove any countries yourself - easy, just delete the rows pertaining to those countries in the countries.txt file that comes with WordBay. Then when a visitor comes from those countries they will simply receive listings from the default country.
I hope that goes some way to clearing things up if you were confused about this, and I would be happy to hear any more insights into this issue!
Posted on September 20th, 2008 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized
[…] read this discussion about eBay country locales as relates to EPN for more information. Remember in particular that if you are using geotargetting, […]
Thanks, you always improve it.
Do you have any idea about GEO targetting for cities?
I’m working out how to GeoTarget the cities. Perhaps that may help me sell some cars. So far over 1200 clicks to ebay and none car sales.
Am I doing the wrong niche?
Regards,
Binh
Hi, sorry, I don’t think I replied to this question. No, I don’t know much about geotargetting cities, except that the IP database we are using DOES support it. It probably works quite well in the US, but then you would have to alter the code so it also identifies the visitor’s city and then uses this as an additional parameter in the feed url. I won’t be implementing this any time soon, but I know you have customised WordBay quite a bit for your own use, so you can probably figure it out easily. But this is what you need:
parameter
fsct=needs to be included in the feed url, and you need to add the code for the particular city (though not ALL are supported - maybe using postal code would be better, but that’s getting TOO tricky!).The city codes you can find by going to eBay Advanced Search and looking at the HTML source code for the page. Find where the “Select a popular city” dropdown list is located and the value ‘name=”fsct”‘. There you have all the supported cities with their relevant code specified by option value.
Hope that’s enough help to figure it out - should work, but I haven’t tested it!
Thank you for your kind support. Yes, I’ve modified WordPress to a level I can’t use your upgraded versions anymore. So I guess I will need to keep reading your blog for changes.
Wish you all the best. Oh did you get any click/earning with customID from my domains?
Regards,
Binh
Hey Binh!
I was going to answer “no” and then I saw a sale come from your site just the other day! I won’t tell you how much, it really doesn’t matter to me how small (or big), I just really appreciate users leaving the “generosity” option switched on as it gives me motivation to keep working on the plugin. Otherwise I wouldn’t bother probably… So thanks once again and keep up the work!
Oh, by the way, I guess I should point out if anyone didn’t realise - I can actually tell in my transaction support WHERE a sale came from because the Custom ID is set to the referrer URL. You probably realised that anyway - that wasn’t a deliberate attempt to spy or anything, but it is a side-effect of people being generous that I can see WHO has been generous! Hope no-one minds…
At some point I will go through my stats and give a backlink to any site that I got sales from, using keywords I find in the meta description, as an extra “thanks”!
I have installed wordbay as per your instructions. Filled up all the necessary information including my compaign ID with EPN. Still when I used the suggested tag in my pages and opened the page it says something like this “not registered with ebay?”
Can you guide me how to manage.
Hi,
Misunderstanding! “Not registered with eBay” is supposed to be for your visitors to sign up with eBay and potentially earn you an ACRU! It’s nothing to do with YOUR having signed up for eBay.
Now if the page is ONLY displaying that message and no items then you might need to look into your settings, so let me know if there is a problem there.
Hi
Just about to begin deploying this on a test site, and could help notice a couple of things you might need for the next version -
Singapore & Hong Kong have been pulled from the affiliate revenue list on ePN. They’re moving over to a recruiting drive for sellers this year, rather than buyers and thus sales - seems a strange strategy to me, but that’s eBay nowadays.
Half.com is now available on ePN too.
Holland, Sweden, and Germany, plus a bunch of others subsidiaries (including StubHub and Half I think) are also still running through Commission Junction - now if you caould add the switching code to go from ePN to CJ based on which eBay site or subsidiary was displaying listings, that would be awesome. The CJ code should be easier to write than the ePN code I would guess?
Looks great so far - both looking forward to, and dreading, messing with the css to get it to fit my first deployment site - no doubt it’ll get easier as I roll it to the rest of them.
Gaz