Regarding ebay.us affiliate links

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As you probably already know, efour is primarily supported by Ebay affiliate links. This has worked great so far because it’s completely passive as links that are organically posted automatically become affiliate links. The money comes from the Ebay fees that Ebay would take from a sale, so it doesn’t cost the buyer, seller, you or myself anything. It’s a slice of the money that Ebay is already taking that instead goes to us.

But in 2025 Ebay has done something that complicated this.

When you click the “share” button on Ebay, they will sometimes generate a link like ebay.us/xxxx which is a link shortener that takes all the ebay tracking data and hides it. That’s the stuff that makes the URL long:

?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DITM%26aid%3D777008%26algo%3DPERSONAL.TOPIC%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20250528152807%26meid%3Da3327c16010246e29b093790cd6b6499%26pid%3D102796%26rk%3D8%26rkt%3D19%26mehot%3Dnone%26itm%3D146796079004%26pmt%3D0%26noa%3D1%26pg%3D4375194%26algv%3DRecentlyViewedItemsV2DWebWithPSItemDRV2_BP%26tu%3D01KE5M93F1FX7ZCSME4CFGTRZ9

This causes multiple problems.

  1. it obscures the item ID so an affiliate link cannot be automatically generated.

You have to visit the link itself to have Ebay decode the URL shortener to see the actual item ID. I don’t think it’s coincidence but it seems like Ebay has made it harder for the forum crawler to fetch a page preview of an Ebay listing. Normally a preview of the page would be shown in a box in the post but since Ebay made the change, it broke the preview and I had to turn that feature off specifically for Ebay URLs, In other words, it seems like Ebay has made it harder to resolve URLs and view item information in an automated way.

  1. Ebay affiliate users can generate their own ebay.us URLs that are indistinguishable from these.

Which violates disclosure laws and rule 2.5: All Ebay Affiliate links posted to the site will be replaced and disclosed. Any other referral or affiliate links are prohibited.

  1. Ebay is pocketing the money from these links

Basically it seems the motive here could be that these obscured links hide tracking information for “Promoted Listings”. Meaning when you share a link from Ebay, they are treating that as part of their own promotional campaign. And when an item sells they actually charge the seller more money for the sale as a “Promoted Listing”

So effectively, these links cost sellers more, generate additional revenue for Ebay and eat away at the only revenue stream for this website (we recently removed generic banner ads).

All this is to provide transparency on why you might randomly get an “edit” to your post by staff updating the Ebay link. Ideally it would be fully automated but Ebay seems to have made that difficult so I will have to manually adjust it when I notice it. I don’t expect users to curate their URLs to benefit us so do not treat this as me asking you to do anything different. I just want to clarify the situation so there is no surprise if you see an edit.

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Also just to add about the ads, I currently removed them since the affiliate links covered the site costs last year. :tada:

Currently affiliate links are our only form of revenue. However, if the affiliates don’t cover costs ads could return. Anyway I just wanted to give everyone an update! Hopefully affiliate links cover costs indefinitely! :folded_hands:

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Is the solution to help the fourum and sellers to copy and paste urls and avoid the “share” button?

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as is, when I share ebay links, I’ll just select a clean url, so nothing past the number sequence. The rest is weird telemetry. I never knew there was any sort of “share” button. So I assume anything I share with my behavior is fine and dandy.

But to be clear, does the affiliate revenue happen for JUST that listing, or does it exist with the session? I’d prefer all my purchases assist website function if its no skin off my back.

I hadn’t considered this, but what IS the best way to make all ebay purchases give back to e4? Like do I need to click a ebay link on the site here somewhere then shop every time?

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How affiliate links work, you just click one and when you purchase an item on eBay in the next 24 hours, part of the fees from that purchase go to E4 rather than eBay. So if you wanted each purchase fee to go to E4, you would just click any link here, and then purchase something from eBay within 24 hours.

For the links, something like this works, there should be a # ad in front of an affiliate link. I attached an image of a couple examples as well:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/366101883482?epid=25043363192&itmmeta=01KE7F0GTBVXH0FPFNNEAHGY9A&hash=item553d5f6a5a:g:BcUAAeSwkwVpWrlU

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@banks Yes In my experience, the .us links are generated from the eBay app. Where copying and pasting from a computer or browser are the normal and working .com links.

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I am not familiar with eBay affiliate links, but I took a real quick peek. Have you ever looked into this feature? It sounds like if you configure a partner domain and include a code snippet, any incoming traffic from the domain will automatically append the referral details.

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https://partnerhelp.ebay.com/helpcenter/s/article/Smart-Links-Quick-Start-Guide?language=en_US

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If I am remembering correct, it doesn’t work well for this site. I think it was because it doesn’t get re-run when new links appear on the page, like when scrolling through a thread.

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I don’t expect anyone to curate URL for my benefit. But if you did want to then yeah, getting the URL with the itm and item id after is helpful. Personally I also try to remove all the junk after the ? because it’s just noise and designed to track me.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/305977827212?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DITM%26aid%3D777008%26algo%3DPERSONAL.TOPIC%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20250324085124%26meid%3D563adcf7f81542069e867446d28ff1c7%26pid%3D101770%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D1%26itm%3D305977827212%26pmt%3D0%26noa%3D1%26pg%3D4375194%26algv%3DRecentlyViewedItemsV2WithMLRPboosterAndUpdatedFeatures_BP&_trksid=p4375194.c101770.m146925&_trkparms=parentrq%3A900bee5b19b0a47ecaea0896ffff862a|pageci%3Ae5a18f18-ea7c-11f0-9cec-362bec44758e|iid%3A1|vlpname%3Avlp_homepage

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https://www.ebay.com/itm/305977827212

If you post either one though, the script I wrote on the forum should recognize it:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/305977827212?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DITM%26aid%3D777008%26algo%3DPERSONAL.TOPIC%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20250324085124%26meid%3D563adcf7f81542069e867446d28ff1c7%26pid%3D101770%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D1%26itm%3D305977827212%26pmt%3D0%26noa%3D1%26pg%3D4375194%26algv%3DRecentlyViewedItemsV2WithMLRPboosterAndUpdatedFeatures_BP&_trksid=p4375194.c101770.m146925&_trkparms=parentrq%3A900bee5b19b0a47ecaea0896ffff862a|pageci%3Ae5a18f18-ea7c-11f0-9cec-362bec44758e|iid%3A1|vlpname%3Avlp_homepage

https://www.ebay.com/itm/305977827212

But yeah I also know that Ebay app actually makes it hard to get to the plain URL so I don’t expect people to go to the trouble.

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Hmm, I wonder if you added some onfocus/onhover logic to try and refresh the link if it would work.

Otherwise you could do some background job for every new eBay link, ping the shortened URL, get back the full one, parse it, make your new affiliate link. I think that is basically how URL un-shorteners work.

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Ebay blocks this type of activity now, that’s part of what I was saying in point 1. Even just to retrieve the onebox preview, it would produce an error page as the preview.

I would have to somehow trick it into thinking I’m a human on a browser.

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