@Juliebabe
I understand your viewpoint, and for the half-hearted (amateur) affiliate marketer it has some validity. However, for the professionally-oriented, and full time, affiliate marketers, whilst there are challenges and no easy route, it is a very valid business model. There are plenty of people making 6-digit incomes every month, and a number making that every week.
Yes you need a "hook" something to bring your readers back regularly - simply having a site full of adverts and no real content doesn't work. Similarly, having a great content site with a bunch of irrelevant adverts tagged on ti it, doesn't work either.
You have to design the site from the ground up to be an affiliate marketing site, plan the niche and its relevant content, the advert positions (including size and style), the advertisers to use, and most importantly the USPs (Unique Selling Points) that will attract visitors in the first place, then keep them returning. You have to build-in from the outset the outreach programs to jog lapsed readers to return - no use adding them as a site starts to fade (it's too late then) - and above all, you have to have a uniqueness that engages the readers.
eBid's core weakness right now, despite its longevity, is that it has no real USP - it's just another multi-format, free to list, third-party marketplace. While it is one of the few retaining the auction format, auctions have never been a driving engine on eBid the way they were on the dark side. With Donahoe's determination to wipe out auctions and make fleaBay into another shopping.com or similar, then eBid should be grabbing the bull by the horns and promoting, promoting, promoting auctions.
Buyers love bargain grabbing, they love the thrill of chasing those bargains, and while it's true the instant gratification mentality has moved into webspace, there are large areas of ecommerce where fixed-price is not the best sales model - used goods, collections of items, "jumble bags", and collectables for example. These are far more suited to auction than to fixed price (unless you're product dumping to clear out as quickly as possible). There is also more competition for fixed price online selling than you could ever imagine - even from the own-site self-builds using shopping carts and buy now buttons - they all compete with fixed price.
Auctions, however, only work when there is a critical mass of bidders. eBid's forums are full of complaints of lack of bidders and too many sellers. That is a constant for needing to market the auctions side of the house. eBid now has sufficient sellers and inventory to go after the buyer audience, and once those arrive, the seller population will be self-sustaining. That is primarily why I say the affiliate program needs revamped to focus on attracting bidders by providing affiliates with the tools to market existing product inventory on the site, and to capture new buyer audience, not new sellers.
eBid could do a lot worse than to look at the marketing campaigns of reverse bidding sites like Swoopo - they never market the membership programs, they only market the bargains - much like eBid did before the switch to the current site version. However, both eBid and Swoopo are not giving affiliates the tools to market the individual products, just the "corporate message".
Most people nowadays do not trust corporate messaging, they want to get straight to the core - the products offered for sale. How many times have you followed a link to an interesting-looking online product or service, landed on the info page, and immediately looked for the price or fee table before reading what the product features are? I do it many times a day.
As the old marketing adage says - "don't sell the sausage, sell the sizzle" and for ecommerce, the "sizzle" is the opportunity to grab a bargain, to pluck a gem of a purchase from the mists of over-inventoried obscurity, and to beat everyone else by winning it at below a price that was your maximum. Again, more reasons why the affiliate program must switch to the auction focus, and provide affiliates with a route to promoting the listed items, not the seller membership.
In the long run, eBid will make more money from success fees and listing upgrade fees, than they ever will from seller registration fees. But only if they promote those fee earning pathways - by letting affiliates market the goods listed for sale on the site. And by affiliates, I mean the "pro-affiliates", not just the mid-level semi-pros like myself with a portfolio of websites, and the supporting servers (ad management, ad network, newsletter, marketing email etc) to support distribution of adverts, retention of readers, and acquisition of fresh eyeballs.
One of my online associates (a fellow affiliate marketer) has more page views per month on his sites than eBay worldwide and Amazon worldwide combined, and his viewer action rate is around 5% of page loads - which is a phenomenal level - most people are running at under 0.5%. It's people like him that eBid need to be attracting, and the current program is of zero interest to him, because he cannot "niche-it" - it is too general for successful marketing.
C'mon Gazza and Mark, wake up and listen to the people you're trying to persuade to market the site - give them the tools to do it.
Gaz
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