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? 

REFUND!! REFUND!! I HATE REFUNDS!

Everyone hates refunds.  But one of the opportunities in any business is to try and understand your refunds.  In Clinkbank they give you to reporting tools:

1) Transactions
2) Analytics

Also on your customer dashboard there is a button to click to see your refunds which brings you to a report in the Analytics page. However, the report only shows you a graph with none of the details. So I went to the Transactions tab to run a report showing all of the refund transactions. Well I found out the the numbers on the two reports don't match...UGGGHHH!!!

So I called customer service and reported a problem.  I received no updates at all. I told another person about it and showed my evidence. They reported it to the developers, but again. no followup.

A few months later I was given a new dedicated account rep, due to the size of my business.  I then discussed the problem with him and he researched it for me.  It turns out the the system is not broken after all. Just crazy how the two sections work.  So let me try to explain.....

1) Transactions - When you pull reports in the Transaction tab, the dates are based on when that transaction happened. So if someone called and refunded today, I would see them in the transaction tab.

2) Analytics - In the Analytics tab, some (but not all) queries are based on the original sales date of the transaction.  So running a report for the past week is asking the system to tell me if any of the sales in the past week have refunded.  So.......the reports won't match.  Now if you run a report for cancels in the past 30 days you will find it here and it is based on when the client cancels.

Are you following the logic here?  If so please let me know because I am not.

Bottom Line = Refunds in Analytics do not equal True Refunds in Transactions.  

But believe me when I say.....'THIS IS THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG!"

Stay tuned for more fun facts about Clickbank that you might not know!

Why I am starting this Blog

I am relatively new to online marketing, sales and affiliate marketing. Back in November 2012 I bought an established internet business who uses Clickbank as there Merchant. During the past 5 months I have learned a lot about them, the good, bad and ugly and wanted a place to document my frustrations. I would like to start by also stating that I am working with a very good account time who listens to my frustrations and is trying to carry my suggestions forward. Only time will tell, but in the mean time I want to share my findings, document them and then hear from others what they are seeing at Clickbank AND at the alternative sites.