Hello ear members of the Forum, I have a question regarding the CJ affiliate program, i am a webmaster and i am wiling to advertise in my site, How does CJ can monitor and assure me that i will be paid the commission on sales from the revenues that my traffic is making in the sites that i refer to, AN example, Ebay offers 5% from each sale that a user that came from my site made, how does CJ monitor this action, is it the reasonability of Ebay to report the results? or does CJ have the "Technological" response for monitoring those transactions? Thanks in advance, yours Tomas
CJ inserts some code in the merchants (eg ebay's) website to track the sales. You just have to trust them. CJ are a great company and they have been perfect in paying me so far.
That's not the only reason to trust them. I used to work for CJ and I've seen how the system does work. It's been working for years and it will continue to work. It works because of the complex source+destination system in place to match a click+cookie to the advertiser+sale. It's completely fraud-proof and there are a lot of good advertisers on the network.
Yes, they're a huge company and they've got a very complex system in place. They do a good job. Trust them, but not blindly. It's NOT fraud-proof, but more importantly, it's not fool proof. Merchants (Advertisers, as CJ calls them) screw up all the time, and sometimes CJ does as well. I'm not at all saying don't use them. Myself, I do a ton of business through CJ. I even choose CJ over alternatives because I like and know the system so well. Occassionally, I need to stop promoting certain merchants because things just go wrong sometimes. Sometimes it's a technical problem that someone will own up to, other times it's a mystery. With any tracking system, you need to be diligent, especially if you pay for your traffic. (I used to work there too.)
Jangro: I disagree, it is fraud-proof. I've seen the servers that the system runs on and I know what a user has to go through in order create a sale. It's impossible to do without actually going through the whole process.
I don't know what seeing servers can do to to tell you that it's fraud-proof. And we may have different definitions of fraud in mind. Let's just disagree there. I don't wish to get into the details on a forum, or argue over it since, in my opinion, fraud is an insignificant issue compared to human and technical errors (unintentional, non-fraudulent), which was my real point. To me, much of it is a cost of business, and I watch out for the big stuff so I don't lose my shirt.
If you've seen the servers and the process it has to go through, you'd agree. It's very extensive and impossible to fake.
fsmedia. I've seen the process, sure. walkthrough from Per and Roger and all that. OK, so it's tough to fake a transaction. Is that a big problem? I think Tomas is asking how reliable CJ is for tracking actual real transactions. Save your time and money. Sure, it's nice to see the system work, but every merchant in CJ has been through purchase lifecycle tests. Hundreds of thousands of transactions (probably millions counting ebay bids) go through their system every day. I saw nearly 500 transactions go through yesterday myself. It works. If there are problems, they're intermittent, and usually merchant specific. Which is why I say trust them, but keep an eye out for periodic problems. That goes for ANY tracking solution.
I trust their stats. If they weren't reliable, all their merchants and website publishers would end up leaving. So there must be a reason why everyone is sticking around.