eBay Affiliate Marketing with BANS (Build a niche store)

It’s always interesting to check out a new affiliate system, it helps us here at Xivos make informed recommendations to our clients. With out a doubt eBay runs one of the largest on the web. Initially everything was done through Commission Junction, but they’ve since taken it all in house with their eBay Partner Network. Normally most businesses would have little to gain from building their own affiliate scheme, but eBay is an internet powerhouse so it’s not surprising they wanted to cut out the middle man and go direct to affiliates.

Never having participated as an eBay affiliate, I thought it would be interesting to check it out. That was in late 2007… so obviously I got a little side tracked with other projects. Earlier this year, researching various affiliate programs for a client, I came across BANS – or “Build a Niche Store”. Initially it seemed like another one of these too-good-to-be-true, “make-untold-wealth-fast” systems. Their forums had a ton of information, and most of the posts within it largely avoided the hype machine. Some of the participating affiliates seemed to have a pretty good clue as to what actual affiliate marketing was about, and provided reasonable targets and expectations (hint: no one is ever going to retire overnight by being an eBay affiliate). Sadly, other projects took over again, and I promptly forgot all about it.

Last month I was again doing research, and came across a blogger who was using WordPress to format eBay’s feeds to generate what was effectively an eBay powered affiliate store. Technical talk aside, WordPress seemed to be the wrong tool for the job, and he was experiencing all sorts of issues. So back I went to BANS, and what the hell, I bought the damn thing, simply on the grounds of experimentation.

BANS is clearly aimed at amateurs, it works pretty much straight out of the box and you have to do very little to get your site up and running. Its templates leave a lot to be desired from an SEO perspective, the default templates are far to table heavy. Not to worry, it’s easy to create your own templates and customization is all a matter of editing a few files.

Since BANS give you an unlimited license (you can build as many websites with one copy as you like), I decided to dust off 2 domains I’ve had sitting around for over 5 years and put BANS to work on them. Now I’ve only just let them go live, so at the moment I really can’t report back with much useful information. Primarily I’m viewing this as a research and development project, nothing more. I doubt it’ll generate any sufficient income, but at least I can play around with eBay’s feeds and learn the inner workings of their affiliate network. Might come in handy for a potential client one day.

For the moment I’ll let the sites tick over for a little while, hopefully in a while I’ll be able to report back on just how useful BANS is, and whether eBay’s network is worth the time or the effort.