Is Clickbank Screwing Affiliates?

I’ve been following this one thread at the eWealth forums for the past couple weeks. The title of the thread is, Very bad week for sales…

The thread started September 12th and to this day is very active. One of the major points is that venders are getting the same amount of sales, but affiliates on the other hand have had very low unusual sales of the late. I know I don’t do tons of sales like big Clickbank affiliates (not yet), but my sales are up and down as well. Just recently a vender spoke the differences she noticed.

I did notice something strange in my stats on Saturday. As a vendor, I sold a record number of one product – without affiliate referrals. Normally 95% of my sales for that product come from affiliates. On Saturday, the average number of sales was about the same, but 50% of them had no affiliate referral. Now that makes for a nice sales number for me – but if something is wrong with affiliate linking – then that will hurt me in the long run.

So I looked into it with my own tracking system – and noticed that several sales came from pages with an obvious affiliate link on the page – but for some reason the link didn’t show up in my tracking stats, and the affiliate did not get the sale. So I’m not sure if there is a problem w/ clickbank – or if there may be something new blocking the CB cookie.

This worries me, because not only will I loose affiliates if something is wrong, but I also sell CB products myself as an affiliate. And I’ve suspected this type of loss in my own affiliate sales in the past.

If this is true, which I have no reason to think otherwise… a lot of Clickbank affiliates, including my self are getting screwed by weak Clickbank tracking. Clickbank needs to work on this before I and other affiliates jump ship! This has been going on long enough.