As you will know, eBay recently announced the creation of eBay Partner Network, allowing affiliates to work directly with the world's biggest auction website.

I said at the time that I was happy about that because I have never enjoyed using Commission Junction. Well, I thought it would be a good move and so it has proved to be (for me at least) with me making much greater use of eBay links since I signed up for the partner network.

It's now just a more pleasant experience to go in and get the links you need, and there's also geo-targetting so you can sign up for various flavours of eBay (.co.uk, .fr, .ca etc) and it will display the right ads for you.

To mark my rekindled interest in eBay, I spent a bit of time playing with the eBay Shopping API and have worked out how to embed listings and search results into my pages (without using Javascript widgets). Here's one of my first attempts, where I display eBay search results below a toy listing to see if it can be got cheaper from the auction site: WWE Superstar Microphone

By the way, if you are working with, or planning to try working with the eBay API, you might well need to look at creating your XSL stylesheets to display the results nicely on your page. I can really recommend Oxygen XML Editor which I'm currently running a trial version of.

The only annoyance I have so found with the eBay Partner Network is that if you want to create plain links, it only generates Javascript code as opposed to HTML. This is a pain but can be got round fairly easily. Other than that, Im pleased with the new platform and look forward to making some dosh with eBay!

Labels: commission junction, ebay