My ClickBank Phone Call
With all the issues going on with ClickBank lately such as slow sales, downtime, and delayed sales reporting I decided to call them and go straight to the source for clarification. I ended up speaking with Diane, she was extremely friendly, and very informative. This is what she had to say…
As far as the sales gaps go, she assured me that no sales are being lost because of this, the sales are still tracked they are just not shown right away in the reporting area of your account. It appears their systems get overloaded at times and that is the cause. Although they ARE losing sales, but I will get into that in a minute.
She also explained that they have two systems running right now. Their new system, and their legacy system. Their new system is the one most of us login to, the one with the new reporting features, etc. The legacy is the older one and apparently they are doing away with it. According to Diane running both systems has been a strain and slows things down.
If you noticed, a email was sent out recently notifying everyone that the old legacy system login will no longer work. This is part of their process of eliminating the old system.
So what about lost sales? How are they being lost exactly? I asked Diane this and she said that when their system gets overloaded they are losing sales because hoplinks are timing out.
So what now? She alluded that things will be back to normal again once the old system is removed, etc. I believe she said the time frame was about a week or so. So we shall see.
Diane also admitted that they should be more proactive about notifying everyone about what is going on.
Diane mentioned that they are still split-testing their checkout page. This of course I already knew as I’ve seen their changes. Although it makes me wonder for what REASON they are split-testing. To increase sales or to test other bank processors?
Take a look at the screenshot to the right of one of the checkout pages that has been tested recently.
Notice the three lines below the pay button? Now I’m not sure if this is a legal issue, but I don’t think stating ‘The ClickBank Marketplace is not a financial institution.’ is going to increase sales much.
Anyhow, although ClickBank is having some issues, they are a great service and I have always received timely payments, they really do offer some fantastic features and make it easy to sell a product or service. I’m sure though that all these issues will be resolved soon.
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[...] Find out what Miles learned from the call here: ClickBank Phone Call [...]
Great to finally see someone contacting them, instead of filling the affiliate forums with plain complaints
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Like you said yourself,
I’m wondering how simply removing the old system could technically fix the problems, but we’ll see. It’s taking way longer than it should, but CB has always been a great service (with great support), so I’m pretty convinced they’ll get it all fixed sooner or later.
I’m not sure what they’re trying to achieve with the sometimes remarkable checkout splittests, but you should note that they’ve previously also tested some (IMHO) better checkout pages. i.e. by adding certification images like Hacker-Safe.
Yeah, I agree, they did do some split-testing that seemed like it would help. Perhaps you can reference some screenshots for those that are interested if you or anyone else has them. I also forgot to mention that according to Diane the split-testing didn’t make any dramatic changes in sales.
Great post, Miles.
In my opinion, I don’t think things have been quite “normal” with CB since their upgrade (when was that November 2006?). As someone coming from an IT background, I know that running a new and legacy system simultaneously can certainly present unique challenges. However, when these “challenges” are resulting in lost sales for us … I have a hard time being so understanding about it.
I’ve been asking the vendors I promote to look at brining in another payment processor. I think this is a wise move even if CB is suddenly “fixed” when the old system is removed.
- Suedehead
P.S. The TID feature is nice, but I suspect that the majority of us would not mind if they simply rolled their system back to the pre-Novemeber state … ugly website and all.
I think you should remove the CB reps name… she’s providing valuable info – we don’t want her to get fired!
Good points Miles. Yes, I’m not sure if this is the same Diane that I talked to, but she doesn’t seem to care about loss of sales. In my opinion that is also pushing a bad image on Clickbank in my book. Especially after all that hard work to promote CB products.