Are Auctiva, Inkfrog, and Vendio Stealing your Ebay Referrals?

By tracking my outbound links, I found that I never get credit for any sales from Ebay listings that contain an Auctiva, Inkfrog, or Vendio gallery or image hosting service. Has anyone else experienced this problem? EPN appears to be more friendly than Commission Junction with cookies from Auctiva, Inkfrog, and Vendio.

If you aren't familiar with them, they have a smart method of stealing affiliate sales. They offer Ebay sellers the use of their free picture gallery plug-in for their ebay listings. When a customer clicks on these third party hosted images and galleries, Auctiva, Inkfrog, or Vendio get the affiliate sale if the customer bids afterwards. So it's best to avoid niches (photography ones are the worst) where many power sellers depend on these type of galleries. The increase in the use of Auctiva, Inkfrog, and Vendio maybe impacting smaller affiliate marketers what use Wordpress or BANS.

If this really bothers you, you can in your rss feed block specific ebay powersellers that obsessively use Auctiva or similar services. What's the point in sending all that traffic to that seller if he lets Auctiva snatch away your affiliate sale at the last moment? On the other hand, I know some categories have several sellers that use Auctiva so blocking them might end up hurting your site by dramatically decreasing content.

 

what do you mean exactly here and based on what?

 

So what else can we do to avoid those types of auctions? Avoid 'buy it now' auctions? I know most powersellers use buy it now most of the time.

 

this is crazy man! i cant believe ebay lets this happen :-(

 

If you search "auctiva" over on Abestweb forum, you'll find a couple of threads about this....I just started one in the Ebay section to see if anybody has info as to how to stop this.
I doubt you can, but we'll see.
Looks like I'm ready to cut back even further in my Ebay efforts.
Not sure how many more parasites and thieves I can deal with.

 

Oh my God, that's absolutely insane.

I'm wondering if scripts like PHPbay or BANS can come out with features that would allow us to bypass these kinds of auctions. That would be nice.

 

Don't think you can by-pass them because they hid by using flash to keep from being identified.
This is going to become a big problem as more of these hosting places get into the mix.
I don't understand why Ebay allows this as they are losing money on image hosting fees.
I started a thread on ABESTWEB,lots of discussion, but no answers yet.
Not that I think there is one....ebay will do what it wants unless it takes money from them.

 

This isnt true. i highly doubt and am 100% sure this isnt true. That means they would have to cookie stuff which is against terms.

I dont see why ebay would pay them when the buyer is already on the site.. All in all this isnt tru at all.

 

It's not cookie 'stuffing'. The customer clicks on a auctiva gallery for example, they are taken off-site to the auctiva website. When they click another picture to return to ebay, the site sets a cookie, Standard cookie behaviour.

What it is, if true is a major 'leak' on the ebay website.

 

Cpugeek....have you tracked clicks from an auction thru a click to a pic?.
I haven't yet, but I'm going to set some tests as soon as I have some time. To say it isn't true just because it wouldn't be right,or against ebays terms doesn't make it so. We need to test this and if it IS true, as simey says,it's a problem.
I guess ask yourself what is their business model ?...they host free pics. What is their income stream?
I believe it is as an affiliate,and I think some of their sales comes from cookies put on as a result of customers clicking on the ''free" pics. Check it out for yourself....go to an auction that has auctiva pics and click....you'll be taken off ebay and have to click to retu

 

Sounds bad. I wonder how often does that happen.

 

didn't ebay stop using cj? are you registered as an ebay affiliate?

 

I did a blog post on this a while back regarding Affiliate cookie Stealing

The apologists will tell you that it is well within the TOS - which it is in fact. The thing I never understood is that they do not add value so why does eBay tolerate? They could put a stop to it by simply adding to the TOS the following.

"Pages that contain affiliate links may not be linked to via any eBay auction page"

But you know if you cant beat them - then join them.

 

Actually it's probably in eBays best interest to let it go. My guess is that they have a lower tier affiliate payout for Auctiva and other big name affiliates, so they get the same quality traffic from traditional affiliates, but pay out less thanks to the cookie stealers/stuffers whatever you want to call them.

 

It might be possible for scripts like PHPBay and BANS to filter out listings from sellers using these services.

 

Has ebay management gone wankers ?

Honest webmasters who send traffic to ebay deserve credit for any affiliate commision, letting some service earn a commission for sniping those visitors by re-directing them around the site... when they're ALREADY ON THE SITE, is idiocy. I for one feel that ebay affiliates need to be able to filter out dealers who use these widgets because it boils down to pure theft.

 

eBays OWN terms of service state that "Pages that contain affiliate links may not be linked to via any eBay auction page" so wtf gives when those "see my other auctions" widgets have cookie stealing code ??

Someone needs to get their head out of their arse right quick on this one. If someone bids and then browses around the site the site who deserves credit for the commision will lose that revenue if they bid again.