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Big news from eBay today. For those of you that are affiliates for eBay through Commission Junction, listen up! eBay will be offering their own in-house affiliate program effective April 1, 2008 and no longer will be using Commission Junction as their affiliate management program.

eBay Affiliate Program Changes Announced

In an eBay blog post today, the eBay team announced their new global affiliate program called the eBay Partner Network. From todays post:

“The new platform will go live on April 1st, 2008 PST, at which point eBay will no longer be running its affiliate program through Commission Junction. Beginning April 1st, affiliates should register with eBay Partner Network and migrate their links from CJ to the new platform.”

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have a good bit of eBay affiliate codes out there on the internet. My initial reaction was, “Oh Dear!” =)

So what about our current eBay affiliate tracking codes that we already have running with our Commission Junction tracking id?

From the same post:

“The eBay Partner Network and Commission Junction will run in parallel for one month through this process, so please plan to complete your migration by May 1st, 2008.

You can receive an additional 5% bonus for all traffic tracked through eBay Partner Network in April 2008 for specific countries (bonus applicable to traffic sent to Half.com and US, UK, Australia, Canada, Italy, India and Spain eBay sites). The sooner you migrate, the more you’ll earn! Just:

Register with eBay Partner Network on April 1, 2008

Confirm your registration, and obtain your new identifiers

Update your links with your new identifiers

Reminder: Please plan to complete migration by May 1, 2008″

The bonus incentive for making the switch early is nice, but does anyone else foresee an HUGE overload to the eBay servers come the first of April?

Which eBay Programs Are NOT Affected by this Change?

Programs that will NOT be affected and will continue their relationship with Commission Junction:

eBay’s Tradera AB
ProStores
Reseller Marketplace
Media Marketplace
eBay Stores
StubHub

My Two Cents on the eBay Affiliate Program Changes

All in all, and after the aggravation of replacing all my current affiliate tracking thru Commission Junction, I think this will be a change for the better. eBay is plenty big enough, and strong enough, to be running their own in-house affiliate program. Cutting out the “middle man” should be a change for the better. Sure, things might be chaotic at first, but I intend to make this change with them.