Forum Moderators: skibum
Their message stated that reporting could be delayed 24 hours but does that mean the reports tab would be unavailable for 24 hours or when the tab is up the stats will be delayed?
Anyone else have an off day/weekend?
between them and linkshare, getting paid is a hard task...
CJ Account Manager Status [Last Update: August 22, 2:45 PM PDT / 21:45 GMT 22 August]Commission Junction recently deployed a series of upgrades and enhancements in the first phase of a two-part Reporting Initiative. At this time upgrades are still being implemented and as a result there is some instability in the CJ Account Manager.
We expect the instability to be temporary, and continue to work round-the-clock to resolve all issues so that you can experience the full benefits of the Reporting Initiative deployment. There has been swift progress in addressing outstanding issues and you can expect to see full resolution very soon.
Be assured, tracking and recording of data has been and is still fully functional. We will post situation updates to the site. Thank your for your patience.
My balace have been freezed for 7 days, clicks and impressions are still being tracked but no sign of sales or leads. I'm worried.
CJ never care for its affiliates.
I am sure i have missed many sales.
I think these guys are having a hard time meeting payments. Nobody in their right mind would implement a major modification right before the pay date unless they did it on purpose to allow them to delay payments. Why don't they just send everyone their estimated payments NOW and adjust them later if the new software is causing them problems. This would be the most customer friendly method.
They MUST be having cash flow problems
Hopefully there is problems with reporting.... The way I see it they owe me 100% of what they claimed I made the past week if not more.. My traffic happened to go through the roof just before that update.. Google up 50%.... CJ DOWN 50%... I am hoping to see a HUGE jump in my balance eventually.
I think they did a major low level database archeticture change and corrupted data in the process... Very UNPROFESSIONAL..
Oh, and a test purchase done last Thursday for web hosting hasn't posted yet...
Date Clicks Leads Conversion Rate
8/11 565 267 47%
8/12 468 177 38%
8/13 421 14 3%
8/14 577 117 23%
8/15 506 157 31%
I refuse to believe that the numbers on the 13th are correct.
Heads are going to roll!
maybe you want to check with your merchants regarding this matter...
I wish a cj representative would join in on this conversation to put us at ease... Are there any premium publishers here that can contact them by phone? If so, please give your rep a call and point them to this thread so that they can explain what is going on.
They have been very good to me in the past but with this mess are basically erasing the respect I had for them.
away from them to linkshare
And that's better how?
This is not that bad, people. A few days delayed is not so bad. Many of the other networks are routinly weeks, even months delayed in payment and after months still don't have their reporting working right. like linkshare
the fact that many of us are at the same time reporting dips in earnings
And I have read just as many on various boards that say theirs are steady or even up. Mine are not down, that's for sure. There have been delays in reporting but as far as I can tell everything shows up eventually.
LS on the other hand still owes me $2000 in commission from March/April from a single merchant. The commissions show up on some reports and not on others. Of course perhaps it come from the fact that their new system is under documented and user unfriendly so I just can't find where the heck it is. This might all be resolved if I got an answer back from customer service, but good luck there.
So, right now, yes, CJ qualifies as not that bad.
Beyond that, I am getting the distinct feeling that many people here have never run or been involved in a regular business. Things like this would be considered small potatoes. 4 days late on payments. *sheesh*, I wish I had clients who were only 4 days late when I consult. Clients and customers are far worse and more brutal in their no-payment, late payment and charge-backs than I have ever seen affiliate marketing be.
Many of you also don't seem to be programmers. Programs like the ones that CJ uses to run stats are massive and still, like any other program a single stupid mistake can whack the whole system or one fix can break another part. CJ could have tested to the end of time and still not have been 100% sure that it would all work right. They were unlucky and yes, they did make a mistake in rolling out before payment time.
CJ is what I would consider to be the most reliable and consistant of the networks. Everybody gets to screw up once and they have done it and IMHO, it's not nearly as bad as it could have been.
Now, if all of the stats junkies would just relax and check once a day to see if they made money instead of every 30 seconds, we might get a payment this month.
I think that ever since Google put the whack on the multiple "websiteless" affiliates directly linking to merchants in Adwords, CJ's publisher base must have dropped significantly. This lowered their revenue volume and hurt their profits. I can't believe that this hasn't affected their business.
Many of you also don't seem to be programmers. Programs like the ones that CJ uses to run stats are massive and still, like any other program a single stupid mistake can whack the whole system or one fix can break another part. CJ could have tested to the end of time and still not have been 100% sure that it would all work right. They were unlucky and yes, they did make a mistake in rolling out before payment time.
I'm a programmer and currently work for myself.. Having worked at large companies maintaining large programs, I know how easy it is to break things on upgrades.. But I have never worked for anyone that would have released such a mess to the public without a SOUND rollback strategy... Sure things break.. but we ALWAYS HAD A ROLLBACK STRATEGY.
One web application had a database that had 100's of thousands of records added daily.... Including audio/video... We could only test these things out so much since we didn't have the luxury of having a customer's database like CJ has. And when we do the first Beta install, we were ready to roll back.. and had to a few times.
I would have been canned If I went onsite and left a mess like that at a customers site.
I'm sure they are the best out there and that's fine.. For the most part they have treated me extremely well. But some of us rely on semi-realtime stats (at least daily).. And to not get these for two weeks is just unsatisfactory. Some of my test purchases over the last two weeks have posted while others haven't... The per cent that haven't seem to match the per cent I am off. (very close)
They say they will start wiring stuff today, and it will start to show up in banks as early as next week...
They claim this delay will be a one-time event...Yeah, sure... lol
I would recommend they get a better network connection to make reporting and linking faster for us all. Maybe a OC-3 or more in their building(or to their servers) if they do not already have this... Their servers need an upgrade to be faster and stop these timeouts - this site is slower than checking Yahoo Mail these days!
It wouldn't be so bad if they were up front with us at the beginning... a simple message stating that key elements of the reporting system is down and will delay payment for up to a week...
a single stupid mistake can whack the whole system
This is an absolutely true statement. I used to worked for a multi billion dollar e-commerce site and when we pushed out new code things did break.
HOWEVER, when things did break it was all hands on deck trying to get it fixed and if things couldn't be fixed in a matter of hours we backed out the code base. If a backout of the code wasn't feasible (which I'm assuming must be the case over at CJ right now) I can guarantee no engineer would go home until it was fixed.
This thing has been going on for over a week now and while I'm not concerned about not getting paid (I know I will), I'm am annoyed that I can't get on and do my daily business that I need to do on CJ.
There is no excuse for this thing dragging on for as long as it has other than total incompetence of their IT department (which is actually a scary thing)...
CJ is always good about making up for 'downtime', which is not the case here - this is just the reporting area, and no tracking links are breaking.
I guess the standard business practice is being played here.. if there is a good reason always.. shorten your recievables and always delay your payables... cashflow is king...
well most of us would probably do the same if we can get away with it...;)
