Used Tennis Shoes on eBay

I’ve been running affiliate links on a few of my websites for the past few months. I’ve been promoting well-targeted products from reputable, well-known merchants who should have a high level of name recognition and trust from my target demographics. I’ve had lots of click-throughs to the merchant sites, but not that much in the way of commissions.

Then last month I started using eBay listings. First, I launched a few sites using the BANS (Build a Niche Store) script, which allows for fast and easy creation of an eBay store based around a particular niche within eBay. My first BANS site was Bit and Rein Tack Supply — which is probably too broad of a niche, but what the heck, I had the domain lying around not being used, and it served me well for experimenting with my first BANS site. I’ve added a few more since then, the most recent being Masonic Memorabilia, which is a much narrower and better targeted niche. I also happen to know a lot about Freemasonry, and I’ll be adding some informational articles to that site, which will help it get better traction in the search engines.

After starting my first couple of BANS sites, I started messing about with eBay’s API, and figured out how to place eBay listings on existing sites, ones that I built using standard static html and that weren’t developed around the BANS script — for example, my Tropical Boating site, which I manage and my husband writes content for.

And in the first month of this great eBay experiment, I’ve had more, and and more regular, commissions coming in from eBay than from all the other affiliate merchants that I’ve tried over the past few months.

People really do buy stuff from eBay. All kinds of stuff. Sometimes they come to my tack shop site and buy a saddle, or they go to my Masonic Memorabilia site and buy a Masonic ring. But sometimes they go to my Discount Marine Electronics site, click through to eBay, and end up buying a pair of “lightly used tennis shoes”.

Yep, that really happened. Someone was looking for color marine gps/chartplotters, found the marine electronics site through Google, clicked through to the site, then clicked through to eBay — and then bought a pair of used tennis shoes.

With eBay, as with most affiliate marketing, the affiliate marketer gets a commission when a user follows their affiliate link and buys something from the merchant, even if it wasn’t what the marketer was promoting. This can make for some rather amusing commissions!

Heck, I’m not proud. I’ll take my commissions wherever they come from. Even used tennis shoes.