I'm not saying the rep was "rogue". I'm saying eBay set up their affiliate program to encourage affiliate sales "no matter what" and then in 2008 they started caring for quality of affiliate links when they didn't care before. Let me try this another way.
There are companies out there that pay salespeople a percentage of total revenue they get customers to buy, regardless if the order is profitable for the company. So salespeople offer 50%-75% discounts for their products to customers in order to get customers to buy, the salesperson makes the commission off the full retail price before discount, and the company loses on every sale with -75% gross margin. It's a fast-track to bankruptcy. No sane company would do this right? That company was called Ecomom. It happens that companies do things against their interest without knowing it as long as top line sales go up.
Companies give people license to do things in their own interest that are NOT in the companies interest all the time.
Right, I agree with you. It's easy to imagine an affiliate rep who is incentivised by affiliates doing well, i.e. they get paid based on affiliate sales. You can even imagine some ebay affiliate reps being "ok" with a description of how they're generating their hits because they're incentivised by the affiliates doing well. Until someone upstairs figures out what's going on. Then, of coure, the affiliate rep is completey clueless about what happend and is shocked that someone would do this!
There are companies out there that pay salespeople a percentage of total revenue they get customers to buy, regardless if the order is profitable for the company. So salespeople offer 50%-75% discounts for their products to customers in order to get customers to buy, the salesperson makes the commission off the full retail price before discount, and the company loses on every sale with -75% gross margin. It's a fast-track to bankruptcy. No sane company would do this right? That company was called Ecomom. It happens that companies do things against their interest without knowing it as long as top line sales go up.
Companies give people license to do things in their own interest that are NOT in the companies interest all the time.