Surviving The EPN Fallout

If you are like most all eBay affiliates, you have no doubt been following along with the explosion of events in the affiliate community that have taken place over the last several days. In fact, that's where I've been - hanging out in different forums and monitoring the fallout. It has been quite and emotional roller coaster over the last several days.

In my last post where I expressed my opinion about the new eBay fees for sellers and how I thought it would affect affiliates, I had orginally said there was no cause for worry and that the sky was not falling.

Not even 24 hours later, I was at the point I was about to regret those words. In case you haven't heard, on August 20, EPN decided to execute a ban on what seemed like a massive amount of affiliates.

The sad part of it was, there was absolutely NO pattern to determine why these bans took place and eBay was NOT talking. The bulk of these affiliates were honest, hard working, white hat, above board individuals. Ebay even admitted these affiliates had done nothing wrong, but were being dropped from the program anyway.

It didn't seem to matter how much they made, how active an affiliate they were, the ban came out of nowhere and these people were NOT happy - and that is putting it mildly. There were some who had been with the program for years making a six figure income, others who had been in for a while and were earning four and five figure incomes, and yet others who were new that hadn't made a dime. None of this made sense to anyone. (Still really doesn't)

Fortunately, I was not one of those who received the dreaded ban. However, like everyone else who was left in the program, I began to wonder for not only my own safety, but everyone else I know as well. I had several friends that were kicked out of the program in this massacre and I can tell you, it really hurt to see this happen to them. A few had quit their jobs to pursue this full-time! I felt so bad for them as a few expressed worries such as losing their homes, their spouses seeking divorce, feeding their families, the list goes on and on.

eBay and the EPN program immediately lost a considerable amount of trust among affiliates and people were jumping ship before it happened to them. I truly do not know what eBay was thinking when they did this. They had awful good aim if they were trying to shoot themselves in the foot and virtually kill the whole program overnight. It was seriously like a bomb had been dropped and the survivors were searching for everyone who was left. Not to mention the fact that those of us who were not dropped were waiting for the next bomb, wondering if we'd be lucky enough to survive.

The good news is that once the smoke cleared, more information started surfacing. Steve, the head of the EPN program, began making posts (albeit vague) on the eBay affiliate forum that gave a few more clues as to what led to the bans. Here is the first thread explaining the bans. You will need to read through several of the pages to get to the official posts, but look for the "pink" and these are the responses that Steve has made himself. Warning: the above thread is not for the faint of heart.

Then on the 22nd, a few people were unbanned after a case by case review. You can see this thread here. Again, look for the pink replies as these come from eBay or Steve himself. He says in this thread that there were only 300 publisher accounts dropped out of 90,000. Doesn't seem like a huge number, but that's still 300 people whose lives were adversely affected. Thankfully, several of them have been let back into the program.

After reading those threads and hearing from the top, I do feel a little bit better about proceeding ahead with my business models and actually doing some work on my sites. Like many others, I came to a standstill until things began to settle out. They have made it known that we should not be concerned about receiving a notice in our email, so we have to assume it is safe (for now) to proceed with business as usual. I will update if there is more news.

I do believe we should all diversify a little and not keep all of our eggs in one basket. I will be talking about how to do this and linking to other places to get more ideas soon.

I'll talk about what not to do in some of the next posts, but for now, I've got to get back to the phpBay builds and we need to talk about promotion as well as link building. These are coming in the next few days.