eBay Accelerates Live Commerce Ecosystem Development: Integrates eBay Live into Affiliate Marketing System for the First Time

[Ebrun Original] July 11th News: eBay is accelerating the development of its live commerce ecosystem. According to foreign media reports, the platform has officially announced the integration of its live shopping service, eBay Live, into its affiliate marketing system, the eBay Partner Network (ePN). Affiliate members can now earn referral commissions by promoting the platform's live shopping events. This move aims to attract more off-site traffic into eBay's curated live shopping scenarios, more closely binding content creators, media publishers, and other partners with live transactions on the platform. eBay announced this news in an email sent to ePN partners this week. In the email, eBay stated: "We are excited to announce that eBay Partner Network now supports eBay Live. This will provide partners with a new way to engage audiences, drive traffic, and earn affiliate commissions through live shopping events." It is reported that eBay Live is the company's interactive live shopping service, where content creators, brands, and sellers host real-time live streams, and consumers can directly purchase products while watching. ePN is eBay's official affiliate marketing program, where approved partners earn commissions by driving qualified traffic and transactions to the platform. Integrating eBay Live into ePN means eBay can connect this emerging sales format with creators, deal websites, and other partners who have long promoted platform products through affiliate channels, jointly expanding the traffic sources for live events. For affiliate members, this provides a new monetization path; for eBay, it helps import a richer variety of external traffic into live shopping. Simultaneously, eBay will add new data fields related to live streams in ePN's transaction detail reports, helping affiliate partners analyze the promotional effectiveness of live events. These statistical metrics are expected to officially launch on July 13th. The improvement of this infrastructure allows partners to more clearly measure the traffic-driving efficiency and conversion performance of live content, thereby optimizing their promotional strategies. In fact, some analysts have pointed out that the development pace of eBay Live has been relatively slow. The service first launched in the US in 2022 and only expanded to the UK market in 2024. However, as competitors like the live commerce platform Whatnot and TikTok continue to expand in this field, eBay has significantly accelerated its layout in recent months, not only continuously expanding the product categories covered by live streams but also actively entering new markets. Integrating eBay Live into the affiliate marketing system can be seen as a key step in its efforts to catch up and expand the influence of live shopping. Additionally, eBay is developing a new model called "Streaming as a Service." This model aims to help sellers establish collaborations with professional live streamers on the platform. Sellers can participate in the live commerce business without needing to appear on camera themselves for store broadcasts. This design lowers the barrier for seller participation in live streaming, which is expected to introduce more product supply into the platform's live ecosystem while also providing content creators with richer collaboration opportunities. With the integration into the affiliate marketing system and the advancement of the "Streaming as a Service" model, eBay is attempting to build a more complete closed-loop live commerce ecosystem connecting sellers, creators, and consumers. Ebrun will continue to track and report on this development. To learn more information related to this article, please scan the QR code to follow the author on WeChat.