eBay Partner Network – Migrating Your Old Commission Junction Links
I just finished migrating all my old eBay affiliate links to the new eBay Partner Network. If you haven't started migrating your links yet, you better get busy. You only have a few days left. This will be the last month eBay will be paying commissions under the old Commission Junction program.
It took me about 10 hours to update the links on all my sites. I had less than 500 pages to work with. I can't imagine how difficult this was for affiliates with thousands of pages.
If you still have links to miagrate, here are a couple of things that will make your job easier.
1. If you have links that were currently created with the Editor Kit don't waste your time trying to update them. The eBay Partner Network has a link to the new Editor Kit inside, but it isn't working. I wasted a good hour searching message boards to figure out what I was doing wrong. Finally, I found a message from eBay stating it wasn't working. So if you have tons of old links that were made with the Editor Kit, you'll have to find something to replace them with.
If you want an easy substitute look in your account under Tools - Creatives Generator. You'll find a lot of banners that will help fill the space.
If you want a better more difficult option, then why not replace the Editor Kit with an eBay Affiliate RSS feed? The ols Editor Kit links were created with javascript. They provided no readable content. That's not the case with the RSS feed. The RSS feed is converted to HTML and provides good related content that the search engines can read.
You'll need an RSS to HTML converter to display an RSS feed on your page. I recommend using Carp.
2. It would take you forever to make new links if you generated each link individually. The best way to save time is to generate one link in the new program. When you compare it to the structure of the old link, there are enough similarities you can just copy a portion of the new link over the old link and save time.
If you compare the two links below, you will see both links have the tag 'mpre=' followed by an encoded url. This is the encoded url that the link directs to when a user clicks it. This portion of the link is identical in both link structures.
To update the old links, you simply need to copy everything before the 'mpre' tag and paste it into the old link.
Old Link Structure
http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1
You wouldn’t believe how long it’s taken me to understand the relationship between CJ and eBay! Having recently signed up to the eBay partner network, I couldn’t understand why some of their editor kit help suddenly started referring to CJ PIDs and stuff. Thanks to this and other articles around I now see there’s some history to all this, but seriously eBay could have made it a lot easier by making sure their documentation was updated!