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Hack 77 Make Money by Linking to eBay

Earn affiliate kickbacks without even selling
anything on eBay.

Like many e-commerce sites, eBay offers an affiliate program, wherein they pay you
money for each new eBay member who signs up through the links on your
site. If you're promoting your eBay auctions
off-site, as described in [Hack #78],
you can make it even more lucrative by making all the links affiliate
links.

Start by signing up at pages.ebay.com/affiliate.
You'll find a few different affiliate programs, each
with different requirements and benefits (there's
even one just for [Hack #72]). But the
"Commission Junction" link is
probably the most applicable, as it offers kickbacks for new user
registrations as well as individual bids. There's no
fee to apply.

7.7.1 Creating Links with Commission Junction

eBay is one of many affiliate sites partnered with Commission Junction, a fact that will
become all too clear when you first try to create links.
You'll have to dig a bit just to find eBay on the
site. The quickest way is to go to Get Links By
Relationship My Advertisers, and you'll
see a list of sites with whom you've signed up. (If
you join Commission Junction through eBay, you'll be
automatically signed up as an eBay affiliate.)

You may see references to cryptic terms like "EPC," followed by dollar amounts that look like fees. EPC is marketing lingo for "Average Earnings Per One Hundred Clicks" and translates to the money they expect you to earn through your affiliate links.

Click View Links to show the assortment of links and banners you can
use (there were 152 at the time of this writing). The listing can be
sorted by clicking the column headers; click "7 Day
EPC," for instance, to show the links that,
statistically, are supposed to earn the most money.

7.7.2 Hacking the Links

But as we learned in How to Lie with Statistics
by Darrell Huff, "There is terror in
numbers." Instead of using the links that Commission
Junction tells you to use, you might want to use the links that will
further your specific interests and have the least impact on your
site. One of the most useful is Link ID 7169491,
"Customizable eBay Destination,"
which lets you link to any specific page at eBay. For a shortcut to
the page used to create this link, just go to pages.ebay.com/affiliate/cjflexiblelinkl,
shown in Figure 7-6.

Figure 7-6. Create links to specific pages with the Creating Your eBay Link page

After entering the address of a specific category, the URL
you'll get will look something like this:

http://www.qksrv.net/click-xxxxxxx-5463217?loc=http%3A//listings.ebay.com/
aw/plistings/list/all/category19116/indexl

where xxxxxxx is the CJ PID, a seven-digit
number representing your Commission Junction account (but not the
same as your account number, paradoxically). Likewise, a link to a
list of all your auctions will look like this:

http://www.qksrv.net/click-xxxxxxx-5463217?loc=http%3A//cgi6.ebay.com/ws/
eBayISAPI.dll%3FViewSellersOtherItems%26userid%3Dusername

where username is your eBay user ID. Note
that some of the special characters had to be converted to hex codes
to keep them from interfering with the link. For instance, the colon
(:) becomes %3A, the ampersand
(&) becomes %26, the
question mark (?) becomes %3F,
and the equals sign (=) becomes
%3D.

If you feel like doing this simple conversion manually, you can
create your links without having to repeatedly return to the Creating
Your eBay Link page. For instance, a link to a specific auction will
look like this:

http://www.qksrv.net/click-xxxxxxx-5463217?loc=http%3A//cgi.ebay.com/ws/
eBayISAPI.dll%3FViewItem%26item%3Ditemnumber

where itemnumber is the item number of
your auction. You can even use these links right in your eBay
auctions, as described in [Hack #47].
For a more automated approach, see [Hack #78].

7.7.3 A Simplified Search Box

Among the 150+ link types are several search boxes you can put on
your site. Unfortunately, each one comes in static banner used to
advertise eBay. To place a simple search box with no banner on your site,
just use this HTML form:

<form action="http://www.qksrv.net/interactive" method="get">
<input type=hidden name="MfcISAPICommand" value="GetResult">
<input type=hidden name=ht value=1>
<input type=hidden name="SortProperty" value="MetaEndSort">
<input type="hidden" name="url"
value="http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll">
<input type="hidden" name="pid" value="xxxxxxx">
<input type="hidden" name="aid" value="yyyyyyy">
Search eBay for:
<input type="text" name="query" size="12" maxlength="100" value=">
<input type="submit" value="Search" name="submit">
</form>

The only things you have to customize are the pid
and aid fields; replace
xxxxxxx and
yyyyyyy with the respective codes provided
by [Hack #46] for details on making this box
look like the standard eBay search box.