Nothing is constant in life but change, and eBay has certainly been doing it’s part lately to make sure that  statement rings true!  Just when you thought it was safe to breathe a sigh of relief, along comes the announcement today that come October 1 (September 1st for new publishers) they’re migrating from the current CPA compensation model to a PPC (“Quality Click Pricing”) format. Loyalty and Cashback affiliates will be allowed to stay on the CPA model.

Existing publishers will have the month of September to compare actual earnings and projected QCP earnings side-by-side to see how this will affect them.  (Read the eBay announcement)

So how will this affect publishers?  Not having a clue at this point as to the actual AMOUNTS of these clicks it’s hard to say, but here are my predictions:

• Publishers with consistent sales, a decent conversion rate and steady traffic will do comparatively well.
• Sites with poor quality/ poor converting traffic will not do well.  I’m going to guess that sites relying on BANS et al, who don’t tell their visitors they’re going offsite to eBay will end up with low click values.

And based upon this statement it sounds like smaller affiliates are going to lose out, regardless of their traffic quality (bolding is mine):

In cases where there is not enough data to calculate an EPC amount, we may pool publishers’ metrics and pay a default EPC amount. This will only affect our very smallest publishers that drive only a few dollars a day to eBay Partner Network on average. If you happen to fall into this very low volume click category and believe the quality of your traffic is above that of an average small publisher, we encourage you to drive more clicks to eBay so you can benefit from a higher EPC.

Gotta love that last sentence.  Translation:  if your traffic is good it’s YOUR responsibility to  send us more of  it if you want to be paid accordingly!

I see an exodus of disgusted small publishers AWAY from EPN.

Last but not least, here’s another part I found interesting:

42) Can I test my own links?
You can test your own links to ensure that clicks are coming through from them. However, please note that if you are using automated software or bots to check your links, those clicks may be flagged and filtered.

Hmmm – so it’s OK for publishers to click their own links? As long as it’s not automated? This opens up a whole can o’ worms bunch of possibile scenarios – I’ll leave them to your imagination!

We live in interesting times …