EBay Enterprise says the move will give far more tools to the retailers who work with its affiliate marketing program, which has 59 retailer clients in the Internet Retailer Top 1000.

EBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions has acquired AffiliateTraction, an affiliate technology vendor that counts such retailers as Fathead LLC, Skechers USA Inc., Guess Inc. and American Apparel Inc. among its clients, the companies said today.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

EBay Enterprise also announced that AffiliateTraction CEO and president Greg Shepard will assume the role of chief strategy officer at eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions.

The deal enables eBay Enterprise to give far more tools to the retailers who work with its affiliate marketing program, Michael Jones, eBay Enterprise’s CEO, tells Internet Retailer. EBay Enterprise’s affiliate program has 59 retailer clients in the Internet Retailer Top 1000, according to Internet Retailer’s Top500Guide.com. That ranked eBay Enterprise fourth among retailers’ affiliate marketing vendors to the Internet Retailer Top 1000, behind CJ Affiliate, Rakuten and ShareASale. EBay Enterprise says it works with “hundreds of thousands” of affiliates and roughly 3,000 retailers.

In acquiring AffiliateTraction, eBay Enterprise is adding technology that seeks to automate the process of acquiring and developing relationships with affiliates. For instance, it recommends affiliates that the retailer should work with, and it also offers dynamic attribution—it tells retailers who they’re going to pay—and dynamic commissioning—it tells them how much they ought to pay each affiliate.

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AffiliateTraction had operated as a technology service provider and didn’t give its retailer clients access to its technology, but that will change with the acquisition. Coupling that technology with eBay Enterprise’s large affiliate network should help eBay Enterprise better serve both retailers and affiliates, says Jones. Jones was a co-founder of Pepperjam, the online marketing agency and affiliate network acquired by GSI Commerce in 2009 that is one of the key pieces that makes up eBay Enterprise. EBay acquired GSI Commerce in 2011.

“Within the affiliate marketing world, not much has changed over the past 10 years,” he says. “It’s been the same old thing. But this changes everything.”

By giving retailers access to the robust set of tools that AffiliateTraction has long used to make affiliate acquisition more like programmatic ad buying, it could disrupt the channel, Jones says.

Within the next three months, eBay Enterprise will begin to offer agencies and advertisers access to some AffiliateTraction tools, with the goal of fully integrating the technology into eBay Enterprise’s platform within six months.

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AffiliateTraction is headquartered in Santa Cruz, Calif., with offices in Toronto, London and Sydney.

In related eBay Enterprise news, Jones says that the vendor plans to rebrand its business, which is no longer affiliated with eBay Inc., within the next few months.

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