Posting ebay Partner Network Affiliate Links On Twitter

So I’ve been doing some testing lately with twitter and the ebay partner network affiliate program. The idea is to reply to people who are looking to buy something with an ebay affiliate link masked with bit.ly landing them on a specific ebay page. The idea did work and it did generated some cash (nothing substantial though) but it seems that ebay isn’t happy about it.

About after a month after implementing this method, I got the following email from ebay.

During a recent review, we noticed that you are placing your affiliate links on twitter. As of August 1, 2009, the eBay Partner Network no longer allows publisher to place links on third party sites. You must own your own domain, and since you do not own twitter.com, you are violating our terms of service. We are sending you this message as a warning. Please remove all of your links from twitter.com or you risk the expiry of your account.

As stated in our code of conduct, section (D) (1), you will not place affiliate links on websites you do not own.
D.Unacceptable Placements.
(1)You will only place Links or Promotional Content on sites you own.You will not place Links or Promotional Content on third-party sites, including classifieds sites (including but not limited to Craigslist, Netlog, MySpace), newsgroups, message boards, blogs, comments, link farms, forums, classified ad services, counters, chatrooms or guestbooks.

Additionally, we have also noticed that your are using URL shortening servcies and this is not acceptable per our terms and conditions. As stated in the ePN Code of Conduct:
Middle servers and URL Cloaking Services: You will not redirect any traffic to middle servers for the sole purpose of masking your referring source of traffic. This includes the use of URL shortening services (including but not limited to tinyurl.com, short.to, and cloakedlink.com).

Kindly reply to this e-mail once the violation is resolved.

Amazon allow affiliates to post links on twitter, why can’t ebay do the same?

If you’re reading this and you were thinking about doing something sneaky with ebay + twitter, think again.