What's My Status?

If you are one of the fortunate vendors or affiliate marketers who sells a product or membership that has a recurring fee associated with it, one of the most important things you must know about your clients is whether they are active, canceled, or pending credit card updates.

Since Clcikbank supports recurring based transactions, one would assume that when I have a question about a client status, I can easily find out whether they are active , canceled or pending.....

First let's take a look at how Clickbank allows us to look up a client:

Clickbank allows you to use three fields to search for a client:

1) Receipt

2) Email

3) Last name

A quick response would be, looks great and simple enough.  But when you use this a lot you start to ask yourself a few questions...Why do I have to go from field to field to search?  Why am I limited to only three data fields to query?  Why doesn't Clickbank offer one search field like a Google search box that would query the entire transaction file?  Seems pretty basic with today's technology. Heck I can do it in Excel!!!

So what happens when we find a client? Does it tell us his status???  Unfortunately, the answer is no.  You have to do some detective work to determine if they are active or canceled by following these steps:

1) Look at the individual transactions.

2) Look and see if there is a ticket open that might show whether they have requested to cancel or get a refund.  If they have not, the fun really starts....
3) Go to the Analytic reports. Now this is a reporting tool which does not allow you to search a clients data. You can only run reports. So you have to run three different reports and search for you client in that report:

• Run active client list
• Run canceled clients list
• Run a request payment list
• Run a request new card list.

Hopefully you will not have to run every report, but the key here is you have to manually search each report for you client.  FUN RIGHT!!

Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy????

If Clickbank has the technology to create reports based on the status of a client, why wouldn't they just have a client screen that just tells us that?  This is database 101 stuff here.  I guess I can't blame this on the developers because someone had to create the user requirements.  I guess that person never spent a day in customer service!!

But I tell you, this is not the worst of it.  Unfortunately, there is much. much more to come.

Please comment and let me know your thoughts! Are other vendors this archaic?