With millions of goods being offered on the eBay site. They realized that even more money could be had by allowing people to help sell other peoples goods. This is done via an affiliate program. Last year eBay ran their affiliate program through a third party company called Commission Junction. Now the affiliate program is ran by eBay under the name of eBay Partner Network.

Being a part of the eBay affiliate program allows you to promote eBay products of which you will receive a commission on the sell of the product. Promoting eBay can be done in a number of ways a few of which are via Pay Per Click (PPC), Blogging and Social Networks. The beauty of being an eBay affiliate versus selling your own product is that as an affiliate. You don’t have to sell anything, no shipping of goods, no taking orders and no inventory required.

The best way to promote eBay products is to host your own website. Building an eBay store can be challenging for some but once you get the hang of it, it is most rewarding. Start off using a blogging program such as WordPress. This program is very simple and can get you many visitors to your online eBay Store.

There are a huge amount of web hosting companies out there but here are a couple that we use because they offer you unlimited domains for one low price: http://www.bluehost.com, http://www.hostgator.com.

If this is something you would like to do to bring in additional income. You must sign up for the eBay Partner Network Affiliate Program then start promoting via the suggestions listed above.

There are a few good eBay Store Builder programs that can allow you to produce a really nice looking eBay Store. To name a few, look into My eBay Script, Build A Niche Store and phpBay.

Before you decide on a domain name to start promoting eBay, make sure to think of a niche market first. What I mean by niche market is, for example, golf clubs or Apple Laptops, or Used Farm Equipment. You get the picture. This way the search engines such as Google will love your site because it is focused on one thing and they will think that you have value for its search customers.

Do some homework and find out which niche may be worth Building an eBay Storefront for then check eBay to see if there is enough product to promote. Once you get everything up and going, you could see as little as a few hundred dollars a month coming in for practically doing nothing.

BANS customers are reporting that up to 95% of their links when clicked are going to a “Page Not Responding” error page on eBay.

Here is a quote from eBay on this recent change:

“For the vast majority of publishers, there will be no need to make any changes to the way you promote eBay or to how the RSS feed is configured. However, if you are using software or tools to further manipulate the RSS feed links (e.g. Build A Niche Store or PHPBay), you may need to check that your links still work properly after the change has been implemented. If you experience any issues, please contact your software or tool provider.”

From what I am able to gather, there appears to be a fix.

In index.php, you need to find this block of code:

if(($siteType == "US") && ($cloak == "1")){
$front->sid = str_replace("%2B", "+", $front->sid);
$link[$counter] = str_replace("http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?", "".URL_PATH."/item/", $link[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = str_replace("&mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.ebay.com%2F", "", $link[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = str_replace("QQcmdZViewItemQQssPageNameZRSS%3AB%3ASRCH%3AUS%3A101", "", $link[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = str_replace("campid=".CJID."", "", $link[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = str_replace("&customid=".$front->sid."", "", $link[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = str_replace("&toolid=10005", "", $link[$counter]);
}

And you need to replace it with the following:

if(($siteType == "US") && ($cloak == "1")){
$itempos = strpos($link[$counter],"item=");
$cloakeditem = substr($link[$counter],$itempos+5,12);
$cloakedtitle = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/", "", $title[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = URL_PATH.'/item/'.str_replace(" ","-",$cloakedtitle)."_W0QQitemZ".$cloakeditem;
}

This change also needs to be done in the FrontControl.php file which you will find in the cont folder.

You can follow the thread at http://www.nichesitebuilding.com/forum/showthread.php?t=38250 to see what other BANS customers are finding out about this change.