Grrrr !!!
I’ve had a Commission Junction account for years, but never really used it to any great extent – in fact, the only thing I used it for was eBay – but that has since closed & moved to an in house program.
A month or so ago, I happened to log in & spotted that there was a mysterious charge of £7.00 applied to my account. I queried this & eventually received a response telling me that the charge was an ‘inactive account charge’. I was a little annoyed by this but didn’t really think any more about it.
Fast forward to this afternoon & I find myself buying a fantastic domain to promote Luxury Chocolates – Hotel Chocolat is obviously the first retailer I think of. Imagine if you will my annoyance when I discover that they’re exclusively on Commission Junction. I logged in to apply to the program & was quite impressed that it was instant acceptance. I thought I might get the bulk of the site done tonight, get indexed tomorrow & start earning commission before the weekend.
I had a click around to find the datafeed that I know is available, but couldn’t find it. ” No Problem ” I think – I’ll just send a quick message to CJ & I should get a response first thing tomorrow. Whilst I was doing that I spotted some very old questions I’d asked when I first opened the account. The first of which was asking where I could find the datafeeds – even before I’d read the answer I remembered why it was I stopped using Commission Junction before I’d really started all those years ago.
The response to my fist question was that it would cost me $200 to get access to the datafeeds! WHAT – ARE YOU SERIOUS? I have to pay you 200 bucks to get access to the data that the merchant has given to you for affiliates use?
Now I may be being a little premature here & I may get an email from CJ tomorrow (or in about a week if the response times from Commission Junction are the same as they were 4 years ago) telling me I now have access to the datafeed – I guess I’ll have to wait & see.
For now though, I’m a little annoyed – should I continue to build the site without Hotel Chocolat? Should I just choose a selection of products & manually create links to them? Should I go & have a Guinness & forget about it altogether?
Sorry for the rant, but I’m frustrated that I’ve been stopped in my tracks by something as stupid as a datafeed.
TTFN
BFG
As annoying as CJ is, and as rubbish as their system for datafeeds is, fortunately unlike four years ago as a uk affiliate you no longer have to pay for datafeeds. However you still have to go through the faff of applying for them and hoping that they consider you worthy enough to reply to!
Thanks Alex,
Good to know.
TTFN
BFG
Hi BFG
We have Hotel Chocolat’s products loaded onto Easy Content Units.
As long as you’re signed up to the merchant you can use their products in our units. If you need any help with using ECU let me know via a support ticket.
Hope this helps
Jason
Thanks Jason !
Hi BFG
Yes Alex is correct. (Thanks Alex)
We have had some feedback recently that people think that we charge for product feeds. This is a legacy issue from way back when. I found a ticket of yours in the CJ system and yes it does state that we charge for feeds but that was in 2005 and things have changed somewhat since then.
I just wanted to post to everyone to assure you that we now do not charge for feeds here in the UK. If you want to get set up, then please contact one of the team here at CJ. Our line for the UK office is 020 8785 5870.
Our client services team has responded to your most recent ticket that you sent last night.
If anyone ever has any issues with responses from CJ, then please contact me directly and I will ensure it is addressed.
Kind regards
Jason Baker
Head of Agency Account Management & Publisher Development, UK and Ireland
Commission Junction, A ValueClick Company
Oxford House
180 Upper Richmond Road
Putney, London
SW15 2SH
Just noticed my contacts did not come through.
Jason Baker – 0208 785 5859 – jbaker@cj.com
Thanks Jason,
Wow – I guess things certainly have changed – I honestly wasn’t expecting a response today so am very impressed. The cynic in me though asks if the response would have been as quick if you hadn’t seen this blog post (bearing in mind the the (excellent) response alludes this post)?
Anyway – all looking good so far, Thanks Again.