markwelch - 5:40 pm on Jun 8, 2007 (gmt 0)

I no longer work with CJ, but I'll offer some ideas anyway:

Are you checking your reports again after a couple of days to see if this might just be a reporting delay? Another obvious question would be whether the sales might be getting reported improperly with a different time (for example, with AM instead of PM)? It's also possible that the merchant's server is in a different time zone (for example, somewhere 6 hours east of you) and is somehow adjusting the time but not the date, so that orders after 6PM your time are shown as occuring the next day -- and when you look at today's report, it might exclude transactions with tomorrow's date.

We have moved into the "summer doldrums," and I'm certainly seeing an "across-the-board" drop in both traffic and sales -- but with sales dropping much more than traffic. But I'm not seeing a significant change in conversions for any sites or programs I participate in -- but then, I've never had anything even remotely near a 20% or 12% conversion rate from any of my sites.

The most obvious thing you could do to test if something is broken, is to use a "clean" computer (cookies cleared) and click from your site and buy something at 8 or 10 PM, and see if your order is being tracked properly. Ideally, have someone else do this, so your name isn't on the order (if someone is defrauding affiliates, there's a remote possibility that they'd notice your name and manually credit the order). Wait 48 hours to see if the transaction appears "later."