The eBay Partner Network (which rewards website owners for sales on eBay that result from your links) is also a great way to advertise your own items on your website and not only make them a little fancier, but also to get a little kick-back on each sale. Thus far, your best options for promoting your own items were the unwieldy eBay To Go (which only selectively worked, wasn’t very customizable and doesn’t load on all websites) or the Editor’s Kit which was more flexible than the To Go but also was a bit hard to customize into something that looked nice.
Enter the Custom Banner (beta). To me, the biggest plus to this is that, in addition to looking nicer than the Editor’s Kit, the size of the ads are essentially infinitely customizable which makes these banners great for awkward places. For instance, the ad space on the right hand navbar of this site is a very awkward size, ending up right between the most common ad sizes around. But with the custom banner, I could specify an exact pixel size to make sure I was using all the space.
OK, so you are sold. But how do you advertise your own items? That part isn’t immediately obvious so I wanted to write up a quick step by step on how to do it.
Firstly, log into your eBay Partner Network account and then go to Tools > Widgets > Customer Banner (beta). Now you can customize the size, color, Affiliate Details etc to be how you want them. When you are done with that, continue with these instructions below.
For the next part of this tutorial, go down to Search Criteria and click Advanced Options. Select how you want the results selected by (Best Match is an option, aren’t you excited?) then input your seller ID where it says Seller IDs (you can actually put several IDs in this field if you have several stores which is very cool).
Now, you can decide to only show certain products by inputting a search term or category but most people will probably want to just show all of their items and there is not an obvious way to do that. Here is the trick I am going to teach you that makes reading this entire post worthwhile. Under search term, put an asterisk (*). This will serve as a wild card search term that will cause the widget to pull its results from all your listings instead of just specific search terms.
Then you can just copy the code on the bottom of the page and add the banner to your site. Pretty easy, huh?
I took your advice, and signed up with the affiliate program. Used your tips to generate my banner code, and it all worked great. Sadly, though, the code messed up the other scripts I have on my blog, so I had to go with the ebay-to-go widgets. I wonder if it’s a beta thing, or the code isn’t compatible with ‘blogger’…? But at least now I have the widgets tied to me as an affiliate, and may possibly see a little bit of income from them, which I wouldn’t have done without your post, so a hearty Big Thanks for your help. –Marianne ~ msdowantiques
Marianne,
I used to use Blogger myself and a lot of things conflicted with it so it could be that or, as you say, it could also be because it is beta.
I am glad you found the article helpful, though! I make most of my affiliate income through linking to our own stuff.
Just looked on the epn discussion forum, and many are having the script/interference problem, so I guess it is a beta prob. Hope it’ll be fixed soon, it’d be nice to add some banners for holiday shoppers… –M.