eBay Hacks

Make Money by Linking to eBay

Earn affiliate kickbacks without even selling anything on eBay.

Like many e-commerce sites, eBay offers an affiliate program, wherein they pay you money for each new eBay member who signs up through the links on your site. If you’re promoting your eBay auctions off-site, as described in [Hack #78], you can make it even more lucrative by making all the links affiliate links.

Start by signing up at http://pages.ebay.com/affiliate. You’ll find a few different affiliate programs, each with different requirements and benefits (there’s even one just for [Hack #72]). But the “Commission Junction” link is probably the most applicable, as it offers kickbacks for new user registrations as well as individual bids. There’s no fee to apply.

Creating Links with Commission Junction

eBay is one of many affiliate sites partnered with Commission Junction, a fact that will become all too clear when you first try to create links. You’ll have to dig a bit just to find eBay on the site. The quickest way is to go to Get Links → By Relationship → My Advertisers, and you’ll see a list of sites with whom you’ve signed up. (If you join Commission Junction through eBay, you’ll be automatically signed up as an eBay affiliate.)

Tip

You may see references to cryptic terms like “EPC,” followed by dollar amounts that look like fees. EPC is marketing lingo for “Average Earnings Per One Hundred Clicks” and translates to the money they expect you to earn through ...