Always one to explore new marketing opportunities, I signed up for the eBay Partner Network.  A simple enough procedure, I was shortly approved by email.  I’ve never had much success selling things on eBay, but maybe this venture would be different.  Next, I entered my payment choices and social security number, then clicked on their “getting started video tutorial” to see what I had gotten myself into.

OK, the deal is I add creatives to my site (links, banners, widgets) and then get a commission if the person going to eBay from my site bids and wins.  The commission goes up as the cost of the item won increases.  Seems simple enough.  There is also something called Half.com that reminds me of Amazon for books, games, media, music, DVDs and so on.  The commissions there start at 5% increasing all the way to 14%.

I created a 250×250 ad at Showyouradhere.com and then pasted in the code to display Entrecard auctions from eBay.  The javascript seems to load quickly and no hangups yet.  The biggest hitch was in actually creating the widget.  I’d enter all my details, then get an error page the following screen.  Repeated attempts worked, and I made the Entrecredit widget you see on the right sidebar.

After a few days I checked back and found some activity had occurred.  4 full days of running eBay creatives had generated 6 clicks and one sale.  A grand total of $1.63 in profit for an EPC of $27.17.  Obviously decisions can’t be made after 4 days, but it’s off to a fine start.  My recommendation is if you can target your search results to the content of your site or article, go for it.  Payout happens at a low $5 USD.