After getting advice from this forum that it's better to cloak my cj links as people are more likely to click on them when they hover the link, and see that displayed info is not an advertiser. I tried that on all my sites and my sales were 0 that day. there's no days i am getting 0 sales. so I immediated changed them back to regular cj links. do double check and make sure, you don't want to miss out sale commssion.
btw, the method i used was the php header redirect. I am sure i did it correctly as i am a programmer myself.
No way don't try it for a week especially if you are already making decent money. I would say maybe 1 full day tops just to make sure it's not CJ being slow reporting your sales. Also, the day after you test it, check the bottom right of the screen after you login to CJ and see if it says you have an clicks coming from invalid links.
Some browsers kill cookies on redirects. It's 6's, for the protection you get you may also be killing sales.
What type of redirects are you talking about? 301 redirect in .htaccess is fine to use for affiliate links.
PHP header redirects are 301 redirects, and ALL browsers support them. I'd estimate that ~99% of advertising is run through tracking links that redirect - in fact, CJ links go through a few 301 redirects before landing at the advertiser. A 301 redirect would not cause a change in sales - it's probably just a fluke. Make sure, however, that your URL in the PHP code is correct.
I've created a cloaking software that works with CJ. This software is not free, but I am beta-testing it now. http://aff.ispeed.com/file.php