This month I, along with thousands of other eBay affiliates, have been busy little bees converting all of our eBay affiliate links to use the new eBay IDs and format, thanks to eBay’s announcement that they were leaving Commission Junction and taking their affiliate program in-house.
I’ve been seeing great commissions since switching my eBay affiliate links to ePN (eBay Partner Network), but unfortunately eBay’s reporting isn’t much better than Commission Junction’s. If you want to see what item sold on eBay for any particular transaction, you still have to download the report, open it, scroll over to the column with the item numbers, copy the item number, go to ebay.com, paste the item number in the search field, and hit “Go.”
What a PITA! I’m pretty good with php, so I decided to roll my own script. I started out with just the basic info that eBay provides in the downloadable report, and wrote a script that outputs the report contents with the item id as a clickable link so that I could go directly to that item on eBay.
Then I added code to use eBay’s developer API to pull in the item name, thumbnail image, number of bids, buyer name, seller name, and category name.
Now I have a really cool script that shows me exactly what items sold in eBay, their prices, pictures, and extra info.
I’m such a nice person, I decided to give this script away to any eBay affiliate who wants to use it. I’m not forcing you to upload your transaction report to my server; oh no…. I’m offering the script as a free download that you can download, put on your own server, and run from within your own hosting account.
I’m doing this because I’m such a nice person. And because I think it just might get me a few nice backlinks.
- You can get the script here:
TWW’s eBay Report Tracker
Excellent, simple little tool. Thank you very much. I did a little write up about it at my site. Looking forward to using it often to examine the many sales from my affiliate stores!
-best success
I played a little with the Ebay affiliate program when they were with CJ and made a few bucks. Since then I have been focusing on Clickbank. I might have to give the new system a try, with your report tracker, of course. 🙂
this thing rocks, best piece of link bait I’ve seen in a while – I’ll be throwing a link at it from my affiliate marketing blog as well
the real money at ebay is made from getting signups, as they pay $25 a pop for that – I like to market items to people that I think might not already have ebay accounts
Nice article for ebay seo guys like me
Thanks for sharing Sonja,
I know this script will be useful to me in near future!
Great tool.It makes me feel so easy to manage my ebay store.Thumbs up!