Interview with Lily Shen - Senior Manager of eBay's affiliate program the United States

Shawn Collins: Thank you for joining us. Today I'm talking with Lily Shen of eBay, and we're going to talk about some of the different things they are doing with the affiliate program there. I want to thank Lily for taking the time to talk with us and look forward to hearing what you have to say.

Lily Shen: Thank you, Shawn. I am absolutely thrilled to talk with you and definitely look forward to sharing some more information. We have a lot of interesting things going on, so yes, definitely waiting for it.

Shawn: Great. One thing that intrigues me, if you can let me know and the rest of the audience, which set the eBay affiliate program apart from other affiliate programs that are out there?

Lily: Sure. I can not speak for other affiliate programs per se, but I must say that the eBay affiliate program offers a win very competitive, very easy to use tools and the unprecedented breadth and depth of products that are currently on eBay .

In terms of compensation now, pay on both ACRUs, what we call active users Most registered, and we pay anywhere from $ 12 to $ 22. We also pay anywhere on the rev share 40-65 percent of the proceeds from the eBay buyer affiliates, and which launched just last year and has proven to be a great success for many of our publishers.

In terms of markets, we have an incredible breadth and depth of products with over 50 categories, 000, and even in Q3, we had 584 million new listings added to eBay worldwide. We also have a global presence in over 33 markets with users from every country in the world, so we definitely provide a great playground for our and our affiliates publishers to succeed.

Shawn: Great, looks fantastic. Can you tell me a little 'more about some of the tools and resources that eBay has innovated to help franchisees to succeed?

Lily: Yes, absolutely. We have a dedicated team here just looking at the products, tools and infrastructure for the eBay affiliate program. We have a number of tools that utilize our affiliates to really get up and running quickly.

To begin, we have a flexible target that allows affiliates to instantly create traceable affiliate links to any eBay URL. We just launched this year a generator that creates RSS feeds, of course, the RSS feeds that include affiliate links. We offer the API free for our members, and only a couple of months ago we launched a plug-in API tool that allows affiliates to conduct some research and become more familiar with eBay API data in Excel.

We also have hub pages, lively discussion forums, and newsletters so the community. I do not know if you are aware of this, but in reality we are trying to launch, probably in the first half of 2007 a product called AdContext, which is a product of contextual advertising that will allow our affiliates and publishers to take down a bit 'of code and put the product on the site, and we call substance, the content from the site and size up the largest number of listings that will help our members be more effective. We are currently in beta mode right now.

Shawn: So that is available to all affiliates or just a select group of affiliates?

Lily: He is currently by invitation only.

Shawn: OK. Gotcha. As for involving the community affiliate of eBay, are you using any kind of Web 2.0 methods for communication, or are events or other things to get in touch with affiliates and keep in touch?

Lily: Yes, absolutely. We have a dedicated team of account managers is here at hand on eBay and Commission Junction, and we handle many, many of our best accounts. We actually have a monthly newsletter that goes out, which provides the best practices, trends, product information for our publishers. As I said before, we have very active discussion forum, and we also do a year of membership by invitation only summit for our top publisher, and runs in parallel with the developer conference. This year we are trying to build that even more and have a track affiliated with the developer conference, too.

In addition, we have very comprehensive pages on your site that provides the best practices for our affiliates who are genuinely seeking to engage in almost every type of business model. We are always looking for new ways to share information and allow members to communicate with each other really well.

The community is really the bread and butter of eBay business, and that is absolutely the same thing for the community affiliate of eBay. We believe it is very important to develop relationships with them and learn directly from them.

Shawn: Great. Regarding the different types of affiliates, there are many types of affiliates out there, there is a particular type of affiliation that is usually more successful with your affiliate program?

Lily: I would not say that depends on a business model in itself. We have a very diversified portfolio of affiliates ranging from portals and content and SEO, shopping comparison sites. We auction tools, affiliate incentive and loyalty research affiliates, of course fee.

We found what makes the most successful affiliates is not the model you undertake as a matter of fact many of them use different models, but what determines success is really there is no level of dedication to innovate : finding new things and really optimize what works. The space is constantly changing as the market, so we find that those who are really dedicated to finding great success in it.

Shawn: Great. For affiliates, from beginners to more experienced, you have any particular advice and tricks to help them maximize their revenue with the affiliate program?

Lily: Yes. We really encourage our affiliates to always think the end customer and keep up not only the trends in the industry, but also the trends of product. Obviously for this holiday season would be the PS3, Wii, Xbox, etc. Some new affiliates this month passed its best only sites built around these products and they just turned the traffic eBay. This is pretty interesting. We really encourage our members to keep abreast of this. I guess that's really hard to try new things and to really maximize the space on the results that you see in the data that we provide. Many of our affiliates have been successful that way.

Shawn: OK. I know you affiliated teams around the world. Do you have any advice for members who want to expand beyond the borders of the United States as an affiliate?

Lily: Yes. We have programs in nearly 20 countries today. Them to be very decentralized, and therefore we recognize the importance of localization in our affiliate program. I really encourage affiliates to market research and understand the same end users there, but also spend time understanding the programs of each of our countries.

You may find that the more mature markets may be more similar in nature. For example, we recommend starting with the countries of the English language if you are currently in the United States. We recommend starting with the United Kingdom, Australia or Canada and you have a springboard to launch some of the other markets. I would definitely say spend time locating enough content to interest the consumer in the UK market. I would say that geo-targeting has helped our affiliates a lot as well.

Shawn: OK. I heard a lot of affiliates who are trying to play both video and phone. You do not see one of those that play a role with the eBay affiliate program in the near future?

Lily: Yes, absolutely. In terms of mobile phone that already plays a role in the program and we are trying to make that even bigger. We're actually launching a site off of our API, probably in the first half of next year that will really enable the detection of affiliation to a lot of people who are building mobile applications for eBay. What we really want to do is allow affiliates to climb in this space. Certainly, in terms of video, we believe it is a great opportunity and we are just beginning to work with some members now trying to schedule this exciting new space as well. We will definitely have more information to come.

Shawn: OK, great. I have some announcements in the past month that the Rover project and how the affiliate program has changed with this?

Lily: Sure. Project Rover is really a new monitoring methodology HTML. We have pursued this in order to decrease the number of redirects users can follow to reduce the blocking of cookies added and to enable further improvements of the global infrastructure. The affiliate program itself has not really changed. We are simply looking for ways to improve the infrastructure for our affiliates and to make things easier. Our goal is to simply providing the most immediate and long-term benefits for our publishers with the project. I would say that the program itself has not changed. We are hoping to make things better for them.

Shawn: OK, that makes sense. Here are all the questions I had. They have other updates or news about the affiliate program?

Lily: I think I've covered a lot with the questions you had. I just want to say that we really are to our affiliates to innovate and experiment and provide feedback on things we could do better as well. We're really here to serve our publishers and we're excited for a lot of new initiatives and future rolling in 2007, as the contacts of the place ads off our API. Thank you.

Shawn: Thank you. Thanks to Lily Shen eBay for joining us. For more information members can go to affiliates.ebay.com to apply and more information about the program. Thank you, Lily.

Lily: Thank you.

Shawn: Great. Be careful....