I think the issue with these reports at the moment is lack of data… hopefully as time go’s by the prices will settle down a bit.

When Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Ireland come on board ePN in September I should be able increase that figure of 50% even more. Although my website is in English is has international appeal.

Will be watching what other people report with interest.

Had been planning a lot more ebay stuff over the next few weeks, but will be promoting other merchants now…

As for this issue, I really hope that it is not just the big guns who are rewarded and it is fair across the playing field.

Its always a good thing to raise the bar but I just hope it isn’t to far for some of the smaller fish.

While I agree with all the points Kirsty makes about the how this model creates an excellent alignment between affiliate and merchant in terms of quality, another point to be stressed is that it effectively transfers some risk from the affiliate to the merchant (ebay/shopping.com/Shopzilla.co.uk).

In the traditional model of CPA, the affiliate assumes all the risk of sending quality traffic to the merchant; bad quality traffic = no sales = no commissions. With the CPC payment model, the merchant takes on some of that risk, paying much more frequently (per click instead of per sale). In the end, the CPC model provides a steadier stream of revenue to the affiliate, with a mechanism (QCP) to ensure that traffic quality remains consistent with the revenue paid to the affiliate.

On the point about paying less to affiliates, that’s definitely not what QCP is designed to do, in fact it’s the opposite! It’s true that some affiliates will be earning less than they are at the moment, but many others will be earning a lot more than before. Also, in the UK, we are using this as an opportunity to actually increase our overall payout to affiliates. On the point about quality traffic equals sales, while for a lot of merchants that may be true, but for a site with the reach of eBay and a cookie latency of 7 days to take into account auctions, not all sales are of equal quality. For example, if you have a site about golf and an hour after clicking on an eBay link, someone buys a golf club, then this is likely to be as a direct result of that person being on your site. However, if someone clicks on an eBay site, then only after 6 days buys a cuddly toy, then this is far less likely to be anything to do with the affiliate’s marketing efforts. Hope this explains things!

Up until now EPN paid purely on results, signups and commission on sales. In what way does that fail to reward quality traffic?

As for not losing sites with poor quality traffic, EPN will retain them as long as they pay more than their competitors.