I promote several products, and, on AVERAGE, over a years time they have converted around 1:25 to 1:40. Over the past 5 days I have had 1000 hops and a whopping 5 sales, a 1:200 conversion ratio. Doing some investigation (starting Friday) I noticed my few sales were ALL PayPal, previously had been 40% PayPal, 60% CC's. Friday night I tried to purchase a product with a valid credit card. As suspected, it was declined. Now this morning, I tried a different product, 3 valid Credit Cards (2 M.C., 1 VISA) and again all were declined. Tried PayPal and it went right through! This is a serious issue, even more so to those doing PPC I would imagine (I'm all organic and it still sucks). As usual, during down sales times, I work harder to get my sales back up, but this is frustrating. I have emailed Clickbank regarding the issue. I know many will say "Quit Bitc#ing", and I'm really not. Just bringing what MAY be the problem to everyone's attention. In the meantime, I urge ALL PUBLISHERS to put something to the affect of "PayPal is the Preferred Payment Method for ALL CREDIT CARD Orders" in bold, immediatly above their buy buttons. Try that for a day, and I think you will see a drastic increase in conversions. Jim
Some members suggest you change account. I suffer from decline in conversion too. I am promoting another program. Will tell you how it goes. !
My test purchases were made directly (or tried to be made) direct with the merchant. In other words, no affiliate hop was used.
I've switched my product back to Paypal. I don't have any affiliates right now so won't matter. Clickbank is seriously pissing me off. They abuse their monopoly position.
I had similar experience couple of days back,i tried to purchase from my mastercard and transaction was declined.
CB should be working 24/7 to fix this problem. This is ridiculous. What are they thinking? Not only are they losing money on each sale but eventually people are going to get pissed off with them and are going to try the alternatives.
"Eventually"?! I think they're losing affiliates hand over fist at the moment. And no surprise there.
As others have mentioned before it's probably their fraud detection being overzealous and tripping all the time. What ever the reason it still sucks but they don't seem to be too concerned about it.
I must say I havent noticed any problems with sales yet... I'm averaging 10 sales per day at the moment so things are lookimng good for me this xmas.
Think of all the sales you'd have if (some or most) credit cards weren't being declined. It's not that I'm not happy with what I'm making as I'm still doing quite well, it's just wrong that were missing out on all these potential sales.
Yup, tested it too... and got decline! also my sales fluctuation is funny, I have usually 3-5 sales in one day, but they all I am receiving in one time period , 1st sale (15:45), 2nd sale (15:47), 3rd sale (15:53) e.t.c and then all day no sales, it's really strange! Also It happens for my affiliates!
Exactly. Those are the key words that give away the fact that Clickbank's behaviour and whole concept of customer service really stink. Nothing is ever their fault. It's almost like talking to a bank. To get them to acknowledge in writing that they screwed up is just a complete impossibility. They need to be made to learn that they have competition.
Hmmm, I have CC sales today and yesterday. Maybe its your CC and fraud prevention? If you're trying to make a lot of purchases, especially diff cards, with your one IP they could be being blocked?
From two different computers, two different homes, two different cities. I will say, in the past few hours I've gotten a visa and a mastercard sale from a product that I normall sell very few of. Just PayPal sales on my main product. Could be a product specific issue maybe?
This seems to happen to affiliates all the time, I know it happens to me constantly. Affiliate accounts sporadically get flagged for "cc security breach" or something for several reasons: 1.) A customer tried to sign up with an invalid or stolen cc 2.) A customer attempted a hack through an affiliate link 3.) An account has been flagged for having several buy attempts from one ip I understand the need for security but here's my problem: Flag the customer in question's IP, not our affiliate accounts!!! Far too many affiliates, including myself are losing money over this!!!! I am new to affiliate marketing & I spend 7-8hrs per day working to promote my products(& I'm a college student so all the time Im not using to study, party or see the gf, I'm working) & my income was $1,300 last month..& so far December has only yielded $467, and I have three times as many hops so far! Theres clearly a problem with cc processing.
So I can knock my competitor's affiliate accounts out by just pretending to make a purchase with a bogus credit card? Doesn't sound like much of a fraud detection system to me... Some fraud prevention is good, but this seems penny wise dollar foolish? What are the damages if a customer downloads an ebook they didn't pay for, as opposed to risking losing affiliates? Hank
So I'm pretty sure after reading this and the many other CB threads, it's pretty clear... CB's payment processing is junk right now. If you're going to promote CB products, don't do pay per click. It can't be trusted. At least with bum marketing it doesn't really cost you much other than time.
I hope you're right alexa. Maybe that will lead them to finally do something about their crap service. This sort of thing seems pretty common. I too experience strange fluctuations. Sometimes things will be going really great and then all of a sudden NOTHING for days. Then things will start going great again. I know I am not alone in this - It's a broken record in here as far as people experiencing things like this. What you describe makes a lot of sense as it would explain the strange behavior with weird sales. But it's hard for me to believe that CB would actually be so stupid to implement such a policy.
I agree.. I was doing pretty well getting sales daily bla bla bla.. then 2 charge backs within the past few days(unfortunate thing is out of 100's of sales these are my first two), ever since then i have had zero sales days for a while, the other day I emailed CC support and today I got a sale again (1:7) Which is my usual conversion.. we'll see how it goes over the next few days I guess