If you are an eBay Partner Network member then you will probably have received an email from EPN announcing the following,
“…from today, 1st September, four new programs have opened on eBay Partner Network for the eBay sites in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Ireland.”
This should be good news, both for people wanting to target these countries, and for those using geotargetting and sending the odd bit of traffic to these eBay sites, increasing the earnings potential. In particular, the email states that Germany is the second largest eBay site, hence there are many new sales to be had. However, note that you do need to apply for the new programs, which I must admit I am not sure about doing - I feel like I want to attract as little attention from the EPN powers-that-be for fear they will start reexamining my account and do something nasty to me. Now why would I feel that way…
Anyway, be that as it may, to the best of my knowledge, WordBay is already set up to handle these countries - there is no need for a new version. All four new countries are available in the back end in the drop-down lists, and all four countries are actively targetted when using geotargetting (you just never got any commission for such sales before). The only thing I need to change in a future version are the brackets around those country names in the drop-down lists which indicate that these countries are (were) not supported by EPN.
Of course, feedback is always appreciated - if you are targetting these countries, let us know if everything is working as it should be.
Posted on September 1st, 2009 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized
Installing now, will feedback if I get any folks from the appropriate countries.
ps. with the new Quality Click Pricing system coming into use in a couple of days how do we think about replacing the default “Sorry, no items available to list.” with “Sorry, no items available to list. Do manual search” and link the “Do manual search” text to the front page of eBay? It’s a bit lame but since eBay moving away from PPA to PPC some of us may pick up a couple of $£$£s that way even when there are no targeted results. (discuss)
Yup
The “Sorry, no items available to list.” is a bit vague.
What could be useful here (assuming it mostly occurs because of either poor keyword choice, or lack of listings for those keywords within the geo-targetting loop, is an auto fall-over to a GLOBAL search results set - i.e. NOT geo-targetted.
It’s sometimes a real bind for me - I live in a country with no local eBay site, therefore previewing results falls back onto the US site, which is not always what I want to do, especially when working with esoteric keywords - in those posts, I need to see the global results.
I’m wondering if a post-by-post switch could be included to turn geo-targetting on or off, such that keywords that will pull a lot of results on each site can use geo-targetting, but low results keywords could be flipped to a global list.
I reckon this would greatly improve results, clicks, and commissions.
Gaz