I have been reading several times that cb has unreliable tracking. Does that result in less income? Are there other undesirable results?
CB has a pretty tight system when it comes to detecting fraudulent payment. If things look shady, it will not process. When fraud techniques evolve, Clickbank acts accordingly. This constant movement may cause glitches from time to time. Remember, they processed BILLIONS of dollars in sales. They have to be anal about it. for your protection. I don't agree with the speculation that Clickbank is stealing affiliate sales. if they were, the vendors would know. All a vendor has to do is watch their thank-you page referral statistics.. When no affiliate is detected, the vendor gets the commission, so Clickbank has nothing to gain by messing with hops. If vendors caught Clickbank keeping the money and giving away their product, they would immediately move to a new payment gateway, but no successful Clickbank products ever move on their own will. or at least rarely. Clickbank is it's own entity and is what it is. Not perfect, but does an efficient job and is a trusted payer.
The main problem of the supposed unreliable tracking, is that it serves as an excuse for the ones that are having a hard-time earning on CB. Everytime the CB account is not showing what you want, blame it on the tracking. Instead of blaming CB, people need to go back to work, that would increase their sales. CB might have an ocassional screwup with the tracking, just like any network, but it's nothing major, nothing to continiously complain about. So if you're not making sales, it's not the CB tracking, it's you!
It results in less income for affiliates and more for vendors. I don't for a moment believe that Clickbank is "shaving" or "stealing" anything. They're incompetent, not dishonest. (Apart from all the lies they tell in the name of customer service when "nothing is ever their fault at all"!). But they're not being dishonest with people's money, I'm sure. They wouldn't risk that. Not when they make an exorbitant 7.5% + $1 on every sale anyway - they don't need to. Their affiliate tracking isn't as reliable as it might be, and it isn't as reliable as that of many of their competitors. But as rightly observed above, it's not Clickbank who are gaining from that, it's vendors at the expense of affiliates. Over in the Warrior Forum, where many vendors discuss these problems, those vendors paying 75% commissions say that doing so is actually costing them only 55% (some even say only 50%) of the affiliate-sales profits, rather than 75%, overall, because of the proportion of the time that the affiliates are not credited with their commissions. I suppose the answer is "become a vendor"!
I have to disagree on the part about vendors getting full sales. It's not that easy for the vendors. I get a large volume of sales on my vendor accounts, and a very small amount of those sales are no affiliate sales. I have already mentioned, go to clickbank analytics, and look at the %referred graph, which shows the percentage of sales which had an affiliate credited to them. around 1 in 10 of the sales are 'no affiliate' sales. Which doesn't have to mean that 1 in 10 sales don't get credited to the aff, but it is very likely that 1 out of 10 visitors visited the site directly and bought the product. I see a lot of threads like this, where people claim that CB shaves, tracking is not right etc.. To those people: whining, complaining, and blaming clickbank isn't going to make you money. Start working, that's how you make money. I was like that myself, and everytime my earnings weren't as good as I expected, I would blame CB, but I'm beyond that point right now, and realized that clickbank isn't the problem. Worst case scenario, assuming the vendor page is honest and there aren't any fishy opt-ins, you're losing 1 out of 10 sales, probably less than that.
@Ripped - Yeah I agree, most people that are moaning and whining are newbies or dudes that dont make that much to start with or are the guys that make 1 or 2 sales a day then it all goes. I think its caused by people checking their stats too much! Once they spot an abnormality they immediately cry foul play and accuse CB of "shaving" or "stealing" commissions. lol I will probably get accussed of working for CB again, but hey I have strange days myself , last week I had a 200 day then the next day I made just $20 LOL. But you see what I did do was hop on the forums and start accusing CB of fraud. I just checked my site serps and made a few adjustments and now sales are increasing, like today I made $293 and the sales day is on even half finished. I think they must be batch processing cos the sales are pooring in fast or people that came to my site earlier this week have decided to buy my products!! Anyways maybe take a look at your sites and think of ways you can make it better, check your competition and see what they are doing, found out what KW's they are marketing, if the competitors have articles then check his other articles out and see what kws hes using and how many views they are getting, if hes getting thousands of views then you know hes onto something so you can go in there and exploit it too. Had guys do that to me and thats just part of the game! These past couple of weeks I've just been working on link building and I think its starting to pay off now! Like Ripped said just focus on your sites and find ways to do it better and be creative, I see guys like taraff1 whos using a fantastic way of making money by just using PRL, videos, and answer marketing on good targetted kws. There's plenty of money to be made dude! And hey its November so things will be picking up and even better xmas is around the corner so it will be a good time to start promoting products.
Very informative and really what I thought.Thanks for your openness. Cb really is fine - we can make it work and be happy! sounds great!