Many companies are recognising the success and excitement surrounding online auctioning sites and are choosing to ride on its huge wave of success. Both eBay and uBid have options where companies wishing to affiliate with online auctioning are given a chance to make profit out of these e-business giants.
Affiliates join up to eBay or uBid or some other trading community and are offered profits for advertising such sites on their personal or business website. When people visit the site and are redirected to eBay or uBid, the company or individual whose site the online auctioning company was advertised on receives a bonus profit and discounted offers. These offers and amounts vary depending on the site, but are enabling millions of companies to gain profit from the success of online auctioning, whilst helping online auctioning sites to successfully advertise and promote their Internet location.
EBay offers their ‘award winning affiliate program’ (http://www.ebay.com, 2004) to anyone who is willing to become a member and advertise eBay successfully. Participation is free and members can receive up to $20 for every active registration they are responsible for. Further profit applies when a referred member bids for an item, sometimes up to 0.25c per transaction. Some affiliates have been recorded as earning over $100,000 per month through the eBay program (http://www.ebay.com, 2004). Tutorials are also offered to new affiliates, to help them effectively advertise and manage their business and affiliation with eBay.
UBid offers a similar program, called the ‘Affiliate program’, whereby profit is counted each month based on referred registrations and bids. Membership is free and unlike other affiliation programs uBid ensures that seller fraud is completely eliminated (http://www.ubid.com, 2004), due to the nature of the business-consumer relation. This offers business and individuals wishing to become affiliates more confidence in advertising the online auctioning site.
A different form of affiliation has occurred between eBay and the company iSoldIt. ISoldIt, http://i-soldit.com, is in partnership with eBay and has chosen to come up with ways to make the experience of selling on eBay much simpler and user-friendly (Krantz, 2004). ISoldIt is an American chain of drop off stores whereby people wishing to sell products can drop of their product to one of the 270 locations within the United States (http://www.i-soldit.com, 2004) whereby the effort to professionally post a product on the Internet, including pictures and monitoring the auction and exchange are handled for a small commission. It is the leading eBay drop off chain, revolutionizing and easing the use of online auctioning.
For further information:
Back to Online Retail
Angela Klein 21:34, 27 Oct 2004 (EST)
