Clickbank Weirdness

I hate to thread jack, but can someone tell me why I am a guest and my posts are n/a. I registered through the register link and support has not replied in days.
Thank you

I was on the phone for 3 days last week with Clickbank trying to get a problem fixed and even after giving them proof they just said there is no way to switch the commissions anyways.

I saw a very strange thing happen last month where I went 4 days - same traffic, same hops, same order form impressions - and no sales. Sure it happens, but when you have the exact same traffic each day and have consistent numbers for months showing what that converts to in dollars it is a strange anomaly. After 4 days sales went back to normal.

It happened again this month, same traffic, hops, impressions, and then all of a sudden 4 days straight at zero. Then I got an email from a vendor "Congratulations - you made a sale" - I thought great, the 4 day streak is over. That was on June 14th - client analytics was down all day, couldn't pull any data until the next day. This particular vendor uses Easy Click Mate which is tied into the CBLA IPN Notification and a feature turned on the Clickbank side.

I showed 1 order form impression for that product that day right around the time of the sale notification but was never able to see the sale because of their system being down all day. Logged in Tuesday - no sale showing. The vendor made 1 sale on that product that day and was notified that I was the affiliate.

The first time on the phone with Clickbank they told me it must be a reporting error on the vendor side. The second time I called to tell them it was Clickbank notifying them first, they said that we won't be able to fix the commissions anyways. The also told me that the 1 sale the vendor made did at some point in the last 2 months click through my affiliate link but the cookie must have been wiped out before they actually bought it.

My biggest concern that I had was - I suspected something strange going on when I dropped to 0 for 4 days in a row, but then when I had confirmation of a sale that is not recorded for me and disappeared on Clickbanks side on the day the system was down all day that makes me mad. The fact the rep just wanted to push me off like I was the wrong one and they don't have errors was frustrating. Coming back with proof and then having them not actually care to look into what may have caused this error is the biggest red flag of all. If there is an error, it seems to me that it should be looked into and fixed regardless of whether I would get a commission back. I don't care about that 1 stupid commission, I care about all the others that I may have had that were lost - not so much that I lost the money because I won't ever be able to confirm those, but more so that the mistake happened, will happen again, they aren't interested in looking into it.

The vendor happens to traveling and I have been going back and forth with him on email, he doesn't really seem to care about getting that involved in the issue - he made 100% commission instead of 25% so what's the incentive? He told me Clickbank could call him if they want to. That isn't likely either. So it becomes a dead end really quick. I pulled his product off of my site and won't be giving him anymore traffic ever again.

This particular website is one of my fitness sites that does over $3k per month just on Clickbank so I'm realizing I am way to heavily vested in something I don't really have control over. There isn't any good alternatives for this product on Paydotcom or anywhere else so I have been discussing different options. I may sell the site and move on to all my other stuff, or have a product created so that I am on the Clickbank account and stop losing sales to lost cookies and strange tracking errors.

One of my vendors actually referred me to this post because I told her all about the situation last week and wondered if anyone had similar experiences.

hehe - no problem, yeah I actually just ignore those posts - I thought you were directing it at the OP specifically.

Short of running exclusively a membership site (with NO downloads), this is going to happen with most delivery systems you use. (DLGuard and a few others are supposed to be good for protecting) - but unfortunately people share delivery page links, and google can capture it too.

Even with the RAP system, about a week or two after having sales up, they suddenly disappear - not that they're going to others, but because someone has either shared the download location or simply just totally shared your content for free.

Quite irritating, but that's another story/rant. LOL.

I will note, that as far as I know, RAP has improved on that... (delivery sharing), and many systems do - but I haven't used it a whole lot since that happened to me a year or so ago. (I mostly stick with logged in content or services for that reason... you can't dupe access to those as easily!)

But to show how easy it is for people to 'hit' thank you pages and steal content, I had a "commission notification" on one of my affiliate scripts, assigning a commission to one of my affiliates just the other day (on an old offer).

There were absolutely no sales, no payments came in, and no new users joined the site they "paid" for.

In other words - someone bypassed everything and got to the thank you page... which did trigger a commission, BUT they couldn't access the actual product/service because it wasn't a download

Obviously it's an old system I don't use anymore LOL - but you can see that it happens with anything.

Changing the download/delivery page every 2-3 days is a very good idea.

Amber