Problem With 1ShoppingCart.com Affiliate Tracking

By Kidino @ 15 March, 2007

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I started realizing this when one of the affiliate program that I am promoting was not performing like it used to. I drive traffic using Adwords, and normally I can expect a ROI like $4:$1. But recently, the campaign was not as profitable. Infact, at one point I was also losing money.

Fortunately I offer my own extra bonuses when customers buy the product using my affiliate link. And customers would have to come back to me and claim those bonuses. When customers started asking for bonuses, and I don’t see their sales in my affiliate report, I started to ask this with the merchant.

And it was then I know that I am not being credited for the sales that I am referring.

To tell you the truth, I was terrified. But the merchant was nice enough to track my sales and confirm that I referred them, and credited me for my efforts.

And yes, the merchant is with 1ShoppingCart.com. And if I got my info right, the problem is with 1ShoppingCart.com. 1ShoppingCart.com was upgrading their system to a new version. And it’s turning into a huge problem. If you are an affiliate with a merchant using 1ShoppingCart (or any of its private-label branding), you may realize their new and different interface.

I was informed that they have solved this problem. New sales from 13 March onwards should be appearing in the report. However sales from 23rd February to 12th March may be a problem.

It’s a good thing that I make customers come back to me to claim for their bonuses. When I am not seeing the sales, I can go back to the merchant and ask them to look it up. And I am lucky as well that the merchant has good support and very helpful and transparent with all this.

I don’t have a bad temper. As long as people admit the problem and fix it, I am OK.

Sphinn
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  1. 1

    Dassana Jayalath said [20 March 2007 @ 5:10 pm]

    Hi Kidino,

    I promote many affiliate programs run through 1ShoppingCart. I better check my tracking links & statistics. Hope didn’t miss any commissions.

    Thanks for the information.

    Dassana

  2. 2

    Shannon said [21 March 2007 @ 2:46 am]

    Good luck working through the glitches, I guess we all run into them one time or another :(

    Shannon

    P.S. I wondered if you guys have read these FREE reports yet. It talks about the DISASTER on the web 2.0 technology. You can download it at:

    http://HenryGoldSecret.com
    (Wild Stuff. No Affiliate link either!)

  3. 3

    Michael Valiant said [28 March 2007 @ 5:31 am]

    Hi,

    It’s always scary when something unanticipated happens to your business, regardless of what it is you do.

    Because of the extent of the problem you encountered, I thought I would weigh in and try and help explain what likely happened here (direct from the source as it were!)

    There was actually no issue on our side that would have caused the problems you mentioned and I should mention that, the dates you provided are likely only relevant for anybody who happens to be an affiliate of the same merchant you are an affiliate of.

    We made a major update to our affiliate program at the end of February and implemented a lot of changes that our merchants have requested over the past year. From an affiliate point of view, we have improved your login area interface, reports, and added a new user guide to help explain the interface for new affiliates.

    One of the updates we made to the affiliate program was to add significantly more detail to the reporting we provided, and this forced us to tighten up how multiple affiliate programs interact with each other (on our system, merchants can run multiple affiliate programs from within one account.)

    The unfortunate side-affect of this improvement was our system became a little less forgiving of affiliate programs that had not been setup correctly in the first place.

    This is likely the root of the issue you encountered. Essentially:

    You were using an affiliate link that belonged to 1 particular affiliate program within the merchants account, but your referred traffic was making a purchase of a product that had been assigned to a different affiliate program.

    Affiliates will only receive credit for products purchased from the same affiliate program as the referral link being used.

    Multiple affiliate programs are permitted so merchants can operate & offer unique commission structures across multiple websites, and it was never intended (and doesn’t make much sense) to provide products from multiple affiliate programs on the same website.

    This is easy to fix from the merchants account and only occurred on a very small portion of accounts.

    Hope this helps.

    Michael Valiant
    1ShoppingCart.com

  4. 4

    John said [3 April 2007 @ 4:55 pm]

    Hello,

    I am a merchant with that uses 1shoppingcart.com and after reading this thread I feel that I should pitch in.

    I have been using 1shoppingcart for about 6 months now. It is a very powerful tool with some great features. However,

    When the new affiliate module was first released, I found that all of my affiliates were not being credited with sales of a particular product. I contacted support several times, but aside from receiving a “make sure they are using the right link” type response, I heard nothing, even though I contacted them several times.

    Eventually I tried deleting the product that was affected, and re-creating a new one, essentially a duplicate. I had to update all my website links, and hey presto! It worked. It would have been nice if they had told me that though. I now have sales which I have no idea who to credit.

    I noticed the same thing yesterday whilst testing a new affiliate program. I contacted them by phone, and they said that they were updating the affiliate module again and that I should try again in a couple of hours.

    AFter a couple of hours I sent a support request. No reply yet though, and I feel that I may be in for more of the same. We have a new product which was supposed to be launching yesterday with our affiliates, and we can’t because we want to make sure that all affiliates get their just rewards. Very frustrating.

    But when it works, it’s great.

  5. 5

    Liz said [10 November 2007 @ 5:42 am]

    Hello,
    To begin please let me say that as a Technical Support Rep for the company, it frustrates me that whenever someone can’t use a feature of the software, they blame the software.

    Please consult your user manual and you will probably find that the problem lay not with the software but with the user.

    If you can’t understand the affiliate module, find another. I am sorry for being short, but I here this feedback too many times and occassionally it is the software’s fault but most of the time it is the user.

  6. 6

    Kidino said [10 November 2007 @ 9:33 am]

    Hello Liz. At the time of this writing, I found many other bloggers reported this same problem. Maybe the problem was evident at the time. And I am sure as a good company 1ShoppingCart is, they have solved this.

    Any company encounter problems — good ones solve them and get back to their customers.

    And I appreciate that in 1ShoppingCart — Kudos…

  7. 7

    ahmed said [13 November 2007 @ 2:31 pm]

    great work

  8.  

     

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