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

And I appreciate that in 1ShoppingCart — Kudos…

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.

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.

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

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!)

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