Tag: eBay Partner Network

Do you run an affiliate marketing strategy on a website that attracts visitors from around the globe? If so, you need to geo-target your affiliate links to maximise your earnings, read on to find out more and how to achieve this with the eBay Partner Network.

Why You Need to Geo-Target

By default, when you add eBay Partner Network (EPN) links to your website, they will link to only a single eBay marketplace and site (ebay.com, ebay.co.uk, ebay.de etc.) This is fine for visitors in that country, they’ll be nicely lined up to complete a purchase. However, a visitor from another country will be less inclined to purchase from another country’s eBay site. The item may not ship internationally or shipping fees may be off-putting. Some visitors may persist and search for the linked item on their local eBay site, but you won’t get the sale attributed to your EPN account. Either way, by presenting visitors with eBay products not sold locally to them, you will inevitably lose sales and not earn as much commission from the EPN.

The solution is to present each visitor with a link to the eBay site that is local to them. By presenting eBay products they can purchase locally with ease, they are more likely to complete the sale and earn you a commission. This can be achieved by doing a reverse lookup of their IP address to discover the country they’re from and thus tailoring the links they see accordingly. Thankfully, there are many services available that can take care of this for you. The WordPress plugin Fast eBay Listings has this feature available right out of the box.

Back in 2020, eBay announced their decommissioning of RSS feeds, much to the chagrin of affiliate marketers using the eBay Partner Network. eBay RSS feeds were a simple way to pull items from eBay for display on affiliate sites. The proposed alternative was to use the eBay API, however, this requires more development effort, signing up to the eBay developer’s program, managing access tokens, adhering to call limits and maintenance to stay abreast of API changes – something the Fast eBay Listing WordPress plugin has always supported.

Nonetheless, many eBay Partner Network users have tried to continue with RSS feeds generated from third-party resources that create a feed using the eBay API. Thus enabling the bad approach of using older RSS eBay Feeds WordPress plugins like WP eBay Product Feeds that rely upon an RSS feed as input. In this article, I’m going to look at why this approach is bad and what your alternatives are.