Here are some notable occurrences from August (starting with the earliest and proceeding through the month) in the web publisher, affiliate and developer space:
August ?? – CJ added the Commission Detail Service to their REST APIs. This enables both advertisers and publishers to access real-time commission and item-detail data. The REST version seems much much faster than the SOAP (tested this earlier in the year, response time may have improved at this point) and can return more products at once.
August 12th – LinkShare has now completely phased out its old interface. The old reporting system was straight forward. The new one has more features, but is also more clunky at times. The main thing I used was the old reporting system for Signature Reports. If you are using Signature Reporting be sure to check out this blog article regarding the Signature Reports Web Service. Note that there seems to be a bug with the EID/ChannelId.
August 15th – Amazon’s Product Advertising API now requires a new Authentication procedure goes into effect. Unauthorized calls will be phased out.
Also note that Amazon semi-recently changed the Affiliate API name again (3rd or 4th time now?) now dubbed the Amazon Product Advertising API. Read the FAQ here.
August 17th – eBay opens Seller Managed Applications for free, boosting developers ability to reach tons of sellers (end-users). There was a large point of interest and some cool demos at this years eBay DevCon.
August 18th – eBay Partner Network moves to Quality Click Pricing system. I’m going to have to read and re-read exactly how it works before I’ll have any serious feedback on it.
"Until now, eBay Partner Network has paid for sales and leads. With Quality Click Pricing, we will now instead pay affiliates for each click sent to an eBay site. The price paid per click will still depend on the short-term and long-term revenue of the traffic that the publisher drives to eBay, but will now also take into account the incremental value of that traffic to eBay, i.e., whether a sale happened as a direct result of the publisher’s actions. The greater the incremental revenue and the higher the expected lifetime value of the customers an affiliate sends, the higher the EPC and total earnings the affiliate will receive. Earnings Per Click (EPC) will be set daily for the previous day’s traffic."
This is a big change. eBay later held a Webinar (on September 1st) which discussed this more in depth and took on a lot of obvious questions from affiliates. I listened in to most of the webinar, but again more to come this later.
August 20th – LinkShare replied that they have fixed the Signature Reports Web Service (Fix Confirmed).
August 31 – CNET Developers require a new Developer Key starting today. CNET has been working with Mashery and now have a new system. "If you would like to continue using the CNET API, you must start using a new Developer Key today. http://developer.cnet.com"
