I've been using ShoppingAds for the last few years now and while it's been a love hate relationship in terms of getting payments sometimes - I have made a decent amount of money from it. In fact before I joined eBay directly it was my best paying affiliate program for my niche since all other affiliate programs I've tried has nothing to offer for me. At any rate while I have started moving primarily to EPN and moving from ShoppingAds it saddens me to see this:
Basically the old EPN (before Oct. 1st) was a tier commission rate, the more volume you sent the more you money you made. With ShoppingAds everyone basically was on the same shared account which obviously put everyone on a much higher commission rate. That's ShoppingAds in a nut shell.
Another victim of ebay's brilliant moves. They are really working hard to drive ebay into the ground.
I just read that Pepperjam also had to drop eBay because they could not support the Quality Click Pricing model.
I have to say I'm not to pleased to see the change in eBay as well. I think it's going to hurt more people's income then improve it as eBay tries to sell it.
I actually loved what Shoemoney built, fast, raw, innovative. Shopping ads left me feeling cold, alone and confused. so fair game to them. Ebay paypal skype etc are a pack of dogs. Its not for the people anymore, And thats there major loss. so up them too.. I used to turn over a !/4 a million a year on eBay, But now i dont even sell any more. The profit hungry eBay collective, lost me a long time ago.
I don't know about you, but so far comparing the first nine days of Oct. to the first nine days of Sept. I'm down by more then 50% with the new program. Ironic considering eBay tried to sell the new program change as a better program. My example earnings for the last month and month before I would have made more money and now that it's live... I'm taking a loss.
I've been using ShoppingAds for a couple years now. The biggest difference between what they've offered and what EPN offers outside of the higher commission tier is the ability to fully customize banner ads so that you have no ebay branding graphics - you could integrate them into your content without them looking like huge ebay banners. From what I've found, that is huge for ad performance. I tried swapping out EPN ads for a time to test the performance and ShoppingAds always did a little better. The one thing EPN had over ShoppingAds was the ability to filter ads by category, which for the life of me, I don't know why ShoppingAds never tried to offer. So far, I've seen a good 40% drop this month due to ebay's new program change. They obviously made this change in order to pay the majority of their publishers less money for the same results. I've yet to see any publishers talking about their increased earnings from the change. I just started using a service called DrivingRevenue.com - they're basically the same type of service as ShoppingAds (higher tier commission). They're new and are still developing their ad banner tool. We'll see how effective they are. I tried them out mainly because they have a forum link rewriting feature that I had been using with ShoppingAds... it covers more vendors than ebay, but ebay is really the only vendor I tend to generate revenue from. I think the real value will come when they finish up their banner tool. I'm trying to get them to go in the direction of ShoppingAds, allowing the publisher to completely customize the ad so that there is no ebay branding, as that's my biggest gripe with the ebay ads - not to mention that with the EPN 728x90 ads, the ebay logo takes the spot of a 3rd auction, whereas with the ShoppingAds 728x90, you have (had) 3 auction spots compared to EPN's 2. We'll see if DrivingRevenue can produce a similar tool/banner and similar results. With eBay's new pricing structure though, it will be tough to get back to the same revenue numbers as before no matter how good the model is.
I have a ShoppingAds question - are people getting paid? They seem to have killed the website now, so I'm not sure how much they owe me. I assumed we'd still be able to see reports until payment was made. Like others, I used to do OK with them, but it was spotty. They definitely owe me money, though! As far as EPN is concerned, they rejected my site without giving me a reason, so that isn't even an option!