Their business will really suffer if they don't! Very interesting to read your blog entry about testing Click2sell. I wish you well with that and look forward to hearing more about it.
That might explain my absolutely horrible sales rate over the last 24 hours or so while my non-CB site is doing perfectly fine. I was putting it on the Christmas season but I haven't had such a bad sales day in at least 2 years. My other site in the same industry which doesn't use CB is like business as usual. I've also had affiliates complaining of conversions going right down for no particular reason.
This must be product specific, because I've had a ton of sales yesterday and today and a majority of them were with credit-cards.
Yes these things seem to happen with specific products/affiliates which makes sense with the anti-fraud flagging system gone awry theory.
I'm debating putting a disclaimer on my landing pages that says something to the effect of "Please select the PayPal Option for ALL Credit Card Payments", but I don't want to scare people off either.
I haven't had a single Mastercard sale since October. Except for a few rebills and refunds, there's nothing much to write home about in terms of sales. And to think this was the exact same account that used to help me pay my housing bills. Now, I barely make enough to pay my water bill
We could all email CB about failing CC processing.... If like 50 of us from DP alone emailed, surely thats a small wake up call?
It seems as everyone has the same issues. I am not trying to be negative, but we are losing money because of clickbank's payment system that the last alternative is Amazon. LOL One of my products was doing well when I started promoting it as an affiliate. I am pointing this out because 1 : 200 hops, you are still doing a lot better than me : 1 : 300 which is ridiculous. Either the credit card system sucks or there might be other problems. I never promote anything without taking a close look at the product's gravity, popularity and so on, may it be organic traffic or PPC. Emailing clickbank is an idea. But I'm sure they get thousands of mails a day and still nothing is done.
Yea when they tag you, your testing and your hopes and sometimes business go down the Fracking link fraud drain! Open a new account and boom the flood gates open. Yea it sucks have to setup direct deposit again, have to change links. But you know what IMO they are tagging our links, and when you get tagged (which you never know when) except when your sales drop, which is a good indicter you have been tagged. Open a new account and its like the days when you started click bank and when you had descent conversion rates, and thought this CB thing works. And Yes lets all email at a certain time when we all notice it, and maybe that will get CB's attention. CB is awesome when it works! Happy Holidays Everyone and Thank You all who have shared so generously on DP, you have been a tremendous Help to my business.
Maybe the people that are experiencing these problems should organize a petition for Clickbank to fix these issues, or at least keep us informed of them?
I decided to email them about this issue and mentioned specifically the overzealous fraud protection theory. Hopefully they'll finally do something about these issues.
Here are some sales patterns on a hot account I have going right now - mind you this is a publisher account, and who knows maybe I'm missing even more sales, but as you can faintly see there are 99% aff sales, and we started this campaign with an internal blast so it has grown from 0%ref upwards... all cards and countries seem to be above par... If anything let this simply be some light at the end of your tunnels, large sales volumes are different when it comes to fluctutations or hiccups, their risk management software might be a bieayetch sometimes but it isn't all that dumb when you have bigger numbers... Try to dig into your gaps a bit deeper and diversify if you must, CB is far from perfect but has not been problematic for me for quite some time now across xx accounts except for the odd hiccup. **EDIT: Thought I should add a few things, based on my observations over the last year at CB and their random hiccups/theories in my opinion. Again this is my opinion only, don't shoot me. * NO - you cannot trigger a vendors account with their RMS nor can you target a competitor to try to overload them with bad orders to freeze the account. * ONLY certain cards, card types, card # batches, regional areas are affected, not all at once. * WHEN a cardholder triggers the system, it seems that the penalty lasts between 10min-6hrs (based on random overall views and memories of my hiccups). * SOMETIMES a vendors site gets hiccups, overloads BW, is slow that day, a competitor does a blast and takes the market for a while, orders stop. * SOMETIMES the reverse happens, you hear about a program, you get on board, the producer does an internal blast and you get flooded with sales because people go from email ad to google and search for the site instead of clicking the email link... Again this can cause a whole batch of aff's to just stop getting orders for said products, sometimes for good. * Emailing CB and complaining about a few orders a day fluctuating to no end will get you nowhere, wait until you make 100-500 orders a day on xx accounts and have both publisher and affiliate accounts active and running, THAT will show you when there is truly a hiccup. * Examine your market, your niche, keep an eye on analytics sites and new products (esp. competitors in your niche/product choice). * Literally 10001 factors can come into play with 'why is my campaigning dying' - sometimes the product lifecycle just dies naturally of old age or oversaturation, sometimes you'll get 100 clicks on the buy now button but nobody will buy just because the moon was full that day or it rained in the most popular buyers regions, and of course sometimes CB does actually hiccup.... Once again I sound like a CB savior/kiss ass and some might think I have an agenda because I'm a publisher, so why not take a second to also say: If you want to minimize fluctuations and really understand marketing/customer behavior/sales cycles/patterns/how to withstand all conditions when marketing, come to the Niche Choppers family and you'll learn a hell of a lot more a hell of a lot faster about this game both in and out of CB. But at the very least, consider yourselves only like 3% of CB affiliates from around the world, the rest are making money or understand fluctuations/operations of all networks on and offline to their core. I wish you all well with your ventures and never be shy to simply step out of your comfort zone, perhaps force yourself to. Happy Ho Ho and all that too everyone! Things to note: *Random countries *Random cards/pp/etc *Random affs *Random times some orders same minute (have had like 5-6 sometimes) *Amount of orders 247 - sometimes more/less... Cheers hope this helps some of you.
It's good to see a bigger vendor who is shedding some light on the subject. By all accounts things seem to be working well with you and you would notice and big discrepancies because of the volume of transactions that you must be doing. As you've said I think Clickbank does have some problems but I'm not as sure it's as big as everyone is leading on (or at least I hope not )
Its good to see all the theories from both affiliates and publishers. There are so many variables that one guy can say that its clickbank problem and another guy can say the exact opposite and both will have some solid points to back their saying. The more variables we bring on the table the more focus we loose on the real signs that we already have that explain whats going on. There are people that tried to buy using their credit cards and their payments were rejected, it cant be more clear than that.....
Well, I received a non-form letter response from Clickbank and surprisingly they ADMITTED PROBLEMS! I hope to develop a bit of a contact point wih this customer service rep, as she seems to at least somewhat care. We'll see.... Here are the emails. I ***'d out information that may be considered confidential. My original email: Questions: Hello, I have noticed some odd statistics today for my promotions. A product that has ALWAYS converted at 1:20 has had nearly 100 hops without a sale. I have also had two people email me saying they tried to purchase and their good credit card was declined. The product is "******". What is the issue? Is there a problem with payment processing? Jim The Response: Hello James, Thank you for your inquiry. In checking in to this issue I have found that the publisher ****** was experiencing issues with their account during that time that appears to have also prevented sales. In checking the account currently, it appears that these issues have now been resolved. Please let me know if you experience any other complaints or problems regarding this publisher. Please let me know if I can be of further assistance! Thank you, *e***** ClickBank Client Support ***@clickbank.com I Just Emailed This Response: Melissa, Thank you so much for replying with something other than the standard form letter. I truly appreciate somebody that seems willing to help! Something is still "screwy" with the credit card processing primarily for this publisher (******) and to a lesser degree, some of the other publishers (**********). Again yesterday (12-22-08) I received several emails from people who had visited my site, and then went to ****** and could NOT purchase with their valid credit card. One was a Mastercard in the US, the other a Visa in the UK. Unsure about the third. Coinciding with this, I have noticed that ALL of my sales from this publisher for the past week have been PayPal, when normally I see 80% cards, 20% PayPal. Over the past day or so, I have been comparing notes with this publisher, and he has been seeing horribly reduced sales and nearly every sale being PayPal, which he say's is not the norm for him! Please pass this email onto your tech people and also let me know what I can do to help solve this problem and WHEN it will be solved. As I'm sure you can appreciate, we affiliates work very hard to build our businesses. Technical setbacks such as these are not only frustrating, but devastating to both our businesses, publishers businesses and Clickbank's bottom line. Thank you, James