AbeBooks, the primary online competitor to Amazon for online book sellers using a third party channel, is pulling most of it’s operations from Affiliate Marketing aggregator Commission Junction.

An announcement from Affiliate Marketing Manager, Patrick who-never-put-his-surname-on-emails, by email yesterday states, “As of May 28th, 2008, the AbeBooks Affiliate Program will no longer be run through the Commission Junction platform. It was a tough decision to make, however we feel that it is for the best. While we have had a long and fruitful partnership with Commission Junction over the last 6 years, we’ve decided that the right decision, both for our affiliates and our own business, will be to move to the Doubleclick Performics platform.”

Having tried unsuccessfully for over six months to sign in to the Doubleclick platform, this is not good news for me.  I’m not sure what the problem is with Doubleclick, but I have it tagged as a non-functional site due to constant problems getting signed up, or signed in, for several affiliate programs managed by them.  If other marketers are suffering the same problems, AbeBooks’ exposure is going to shrink rapidly.

Apparently the AbeBooks UK program is staying with Commission Junction though, so that’s a welcome relief .  At least I’ll still be able to offer the UK an alternative to Amazon & eBay in my banner ad programs.  Those who can access Doubleclicks will also be able to offer AbeBooks UK from there, as the site will run both aggregators side by side.

It’s less than a month since eBay announced they were pulling most of their programs from the Commission Junction platform, and it’s only taken a week for severe registration censorship, and other publisher blocking, to become apparent, as I blogged yesterday.

Two major account losses in under a month doesn’t set a trend, but it does make me wonder what CJ have been up to, to make such major players leave them so suddenly.  Afterall, it was only a couple of months ago that eBay UK announced a doubling of commissions for sign-ups acquired through CJ, and only nine(ish) months ago that eBay completely revamped all their affiliate codes to the new rover.ebay.com coding.

Has the disruption from the rover.eBay switchover caused a loss of affiliate effectiveness?  Are eBay again making decisions on flawed or incomplete data?  Did that cause AbeBooks to follow suit, or did Doubleclicks offer them a deal they couldn’t refuse?  I guess, as ever, we’ll never know the full story from eBay.

Ed

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