CCBll Affiliate System Screwed?
 

Here's a thing. CCBill sales at Glamour Images have been awful this week. Fallen off a cliff.

However, checking my paysite stats this morning it says "Affiliate Payout = $0.00" so net sales = 100% of gross. Very nice, but not true!

In my inbox I have a few "A Web Partner Has Made A Sale" emails. Checked at CCBill and low and behold there are sales with an affiliate codes allocated but it still says "no commissions".

WTF? Haven't got time to do a deeper analysis but is anyone else seeing the same thing?

There was a thread on GFY about ccbill affiliate links not working, generating an error message, and ccbill acknowledged that they were aware and working on the issue.

I could never recreate the error checking my own links, but everyone that was posting that they were indeed getting the error were European webmasters. It seems to have been isolated to IPs within that region. A significant part of my traffic is UK and Germany, so my sales have definitely been down.

I am ignoring yesterday, especially on our paysites, because in theory, those affiliates that had sales need to receive their commission. I don't want any surprises down the line!

Just hope I get the same boost on my affiliate side!

Don't know about you Toby, or anyone else for that matter, but I am becoming more and more disillusioned with CCBill by the day. Their reporting systems are ridiculously slow now, if they even work at all, and they seem to becoming more and more error prone.

Yeah, there have definitely been some performance issues. I think perhaps they're trying to address some of them, and that may be the source of issues like the ones this week.

But, the checks still show up every week. Given the number of sites I promote I'd go broke waiting to meet minimum payouts if they were all using NATS or similar.

My ratio this month so far are the worst I've ever seen a ccbill ratio of mine, in my life.

That said, seems like their affiliate backend is working perfectly for me today. I don't get it at all :(

Interesting what you say Toby. I was chatting on another board yesterday and pretty much everyone on there had switched their paysites to Epoch for their direct traffic. It's only the convenience etc of the CCBill affiliate programme that's stopping the switch to pretty much 100% Epoch.

If Epoch had anything about them they would work a lot harder on their affiliate system which is currently crap!

For me it's not so bad if sponsors pay by Paxum. Checks are way to slow, plus there are costs. Wires are worse. Typically a wire @ $35/$50 means $30/$85 cost to me total. Not worth it.

There are some pretty lazy/thick sponsors out there that are living to far in the past - then moan because business is bad.

Sorry could you elaborate this a bit more? What do you mean by "direct traffic to Epoch"?
All we did till now is using Epoch in cascade with CCBill, using Epoch as second choice exactly because of the existing Affiliates we have. Switching to Epoch would mean asking them to change all their links (and i am not sure affiliates like Epoch as much as CCBill, because of the number of sponsors using one or the other).

I have always had a merchant account and only use ccbill for affiliates. The benefits are enormous because we control our risk tolerance. I am not sure why anyone would rely on a third party billing exclusively.

By direct traffic I meant traffic not coming from affiliates (e.g. search engines, bookmarks etc). The direct traffic has Epoch as the primary biller, not CCBill. Affiliate traffic has CCBill as the primary biller cascading to Epoch.

Couldn't get one back in the day and even more difficult now. Certainly in Europe.

The trick is to open an account and leave a deposit to cover any c/b issues. I faced the same issues as you but it is soooooooo worth the effort. Those guys on that "other" board are chasing their tails.

Thanks a lot Cots, very very clear and...actually something i will probably try to implement as well.