I created a plugin a while back that would read and parse the link created by the Ebay Partner Network RSS generator link widet. It made me a steady $500 a month for years and then stopped. I make maybe\u00a0 $5 a month now. EPN was a cash cow and did far better than ads or other affiliate programs because I could link directly to auctions that my readers would find interesting. Now nothing!<\/p>\n
I figured it was the general drop of internet advertising revenues that I’ve experienced over the last few years, combined with EPN changing some TOS to cheat me out of revenue.<\/p>\n
Recently, I clicked on an item that looked interesting from one of my web pages and I did not go to the right page. I went to some kind of landing page with only one picture and no description. I had to click again to get to the main listing. As we all know, surfers will not scroll, they will not read anything but headlines and the won’t click buttons.<\/p>\n
The result was that I was losing revenue. Today it is a freezing cold day, and I am stuck inside, so I tried to debug the issue and I was able to alter my plugin – adding three lines, that fixed the issue.<\/p>\n
This is what I added: $d is the display area of the widget. I don’t know which of the changes did it, and since it is working I won’t change anything. The link needs the older type item and vectorid parameters, and the tool id is the tool id for an individual link. These things fool the API into thinking you are coming in from one of their generated links, and not the RSS.<\/p>\n I would offer the plugin to you all, but it has things hard coded. The category, my id, the campaign and the list of search terms that I use to randomize the search each time the thing is displayed are all part of the code. It would require a coder to fix it up.<\/p>\n If you are the author of a an EPN plugin feel free to try this. If you use an EPN plugin, tell the author about this.<\/p>\n EPN does far better than any other affiliate program for sites that are highly focused on products that can be found on eBay. I hope that I have fixed the issue and that in a week or two, as auctions complete, I will start getting some revenue back.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I created a plugin a while back that would read and parse the link created by the Ebay Partner Network RSS generator link widet. It made me a steady $500 a month for years and then stopped. I make maybe\u00a0 $5 a month now. EPN was a cash cow and did far better than ads […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogseye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogseye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogseye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogseye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogseye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1088"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blogseye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1089,"href":"http:\/\/blogseye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088\/revisions\/1089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogseye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogseye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogseye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/code><\/p>\n\t$d=str_replace('item','icep_item',$d);\r\n\t$d=str_replace('vectorid','icep_vectorid',$d);\r\n\t$d=str_replace('toolid=10039','toolid=10001',$d);\r\n<\/pre>\n