Day #1 might be a little hasty to get worried. Did you look at preview reports for mid-August and September? How did you do with QCP? What was your EPC?

Again, I’m having a weird theory related to organic search (readers) vs. PPC (buyers) and their QCP model. Seems like with organic, you’ll be risking the browsing type that will click but not purchase.. and more importantly, not create a recurring purchase. eBay is looking for repeat customers, and customers that are using your site as a source for a good purchase.

Personally, day #1 I had over 700 clicks and almost made double my average daily commission. I do some PPC to my EPN sites, but I also focus on ‘tight’ niches and provide a benefit for users to use my sites to help navigate eBay… or that was the plan anyway.

If you’re relying on organic search solely, I would see if you can target keywords that are related to purchases vs. browsing. Not sure how to do that in your particular niche, but I’ve been reading lots of posts of targeting organic buyers. If you’re getting a ton of readers/browsers to eBay, your quality will go down.. and so will your earnings. I’m surprised you still didn’t get ‘earnings’ with a EPC of .05 though? That should have still calc’d to earnings? Odd.

Hang in there.. and diversify to other networks in the meantime. I have done 0 EPN development in the last 2 months and been working on other projects. If EPN turns out good, I’ll fire up development, but if it turns out bad, It’s good to know that I’ve been working on other options.

Good luck! And thanks for commenting.

I think it comes down to the traffic that you’re sending them. $92.00 in earnings is pretty hard to determine a ‘trend’ per se. Meaning, was there a single big purchase in that mix to make it to $92, while the majority of sales were in sub $1 range? If so, that would directly impact your EPC and affect your earnings.

If I was in your position, I would continue to ride it a few more months and think of ways to generate recurring traffic to the site, if the sales are still low, then move on, or improve your tactics.

For me, the new scale is very promising. The first preview, I would have doubled my earnings. I was up $1000 for September if I was on the new system.

Change is concerning, and I’m going to be definitely watching dips. In fact the last two months I’ve done nothing but build Amazon store fronts, until the dust settles. If EPN still looks good, I’ll get back to promoting EPN again, but I need to get my confidence back. No sense to panic and ditch without seeing some cold hard numbers first.

hanji

Example, I earned 92.00 for sept. Quality Click Pricing predicts my payment would be 32.00 for the same traffic.

What is wrong with that?

The 92.00 is based on actual earnings for auctions won by people who come to ebay through my links. Why is it ok for ebay to now claim that traffic is worth only 32.00?

The 92.00 was based on performance. Quality Click Pricing is based on voodoo.

I will be removing every ebay auction link I have and replacing them with something else. Probably aff links from a source who sells something from my site’s niche but anything is better then dealing with a company who just wants me to be happy being screwed.

ebay, you suck!

At this point all my campaigns are still at QCP EPC = $0.00 and no contact back from EPN either via email or through their support forum. I’m coming to the realization quickly that trying to run a business with low volume, long tail niches using eBay/EPN is just not possible. It’s too easy to be suddenly put out of business.

Trouble news indeed! I think if memory serves me correctly from one of the webinars, that they said that EPC would be averaged with the low performers. With that said, you should be above $0.00.

You mentioned you don’t have access to the raw logs, I’m not sure about your programming skills, but it may be worth creating a ‘click through’ script some how that would capture destination, referrer, IP and User Agent of the click. Are there useful analytics? Google Analytics or Awstats that would include high traffic? These would not include the click through, but you might see unusually high traffic from a single source on 9/19 that you could send to EPN.

Also, are you sure this isn’t bot traffic? Did you get slash dotted or experience a digg effect on a product, post, category, etc?

Thanks for commenting!
hanji

Last month was spectacular but this month was dismal for some reason (economy I guess). Because this month started slow, my QCP suffered and never caught up to my actual earnings. No problem I said, the buyers will come back and QCP will work just fine in the end.

Well disaster struck on 9/19 when one of my sites received 1,400+ eBay clicks from some bot (unfortunately I don't have the raw logs to find out who is was). I have nofollow's on all links but this bot ignored that. On that day, every single one of my campaigns was given a QCP EPC of $0.00! Even though I have $'s coming in using the old method, I would be earning $0.00 under the new QCP method.

I have reported this to EPN on 9/19 and tonight on the EPN forums. I'd like to know how one website in the campaign can have such a negative impact on all sites within the account. I'd like to know if they reset the QPC EPC every month (doubt that one).

It will be interesting to see how they respond to this because as you know we never had to worry about this in the past. If I don't get a positive response to problem, I have just learned that you can't run a serious business using EPN because some situation completely out of your control can take down your entire business.

I'll keep you posted. Thanks for the great website.