I’ll still be using Commission Junction for some other affiliate programs I use, but eBay has gone in-house, and of course I’ve gone with ‘em.

I wrote a little php script to read eBay’s “transaction download” file and give me clickable links to the eBay items sold. I’m giving that script away for free (at least for now). You can download my ePN Report Tracker for free and run it on your own server — no need to worry about giving up your transaction report data to some anonymous stranger on the internet.

If you like my little script, please say “thank you” by giving me a link.

Suddenly, this month, the “Program Performance” report on my account home page in CJ is showing 3 green bars (out of 5) for “Network Earnings.” According to CJ’s help pages, this means that my earnings are in the 60th-79th percentile of the entire CJ network. I’m not a math whiz, but I’m pretty sure that means that I’m earning more (in CJ) than at least 60 percent of the other CJ affiliates.

I’ll repeat what I said in the first paragraph: I’m not earning very much from CJ. Not enough to pay my mortgage payment. Not even enough to cover my grocery bill. Based on this month’s commissions so far, it looks like I’ll make enough this month to pay my electric bill. That’s not impressive — and yet, it’s more than what 60% of CJ’s affiliates are making. Commission Junction doesn’t include affiliates with zero earnings in this computation, either. Clearly, there are a whole lot of affiliate marketers in CJ’s program who aren’t even earning enough to pay their electric bill.

I understand the really successful affiliates (Super Affiliates, they’re sometimes called) make a lot of money, and I hope to join them eventually.

I imagine moving up into the “4 green bars” Program Performance slot will require a lot more earnings, and hitting on all 5 bars may well be an impossible goal. Affiliate marketing is certainly making a few people rich — but most of us poor slobs are doing well if we can cover our electric bills.

Commission Junction is one of the biggest and best-known (if not the biggest and best-known) of the affiliate networks out there.

So I just don’t understand why they can’t run a web site that works consistently. Over and over, every few days, the CJ website times out when trying to log in or run reports. Some days I can’t log in at all. I’ve contacted CJ’s support desk — all they tell me is to clear my cookies or restart my browser. Dammit, it’s not my cookies or my browser. I’m a reasonably savvy Internet user who has tried every possible thing I can do on my end, including visiting the site on a new browser that has never even been to the CJ site before.

It’s not confidence inspiring. It makes me wonder how much affiliate tracking isn’t being tracked, and how many affiliate commissions aren’t being committed.

Google’s AdSense program isn’t known for open communication with publishers, but at least Google puts a notice on their AdSense pages when they’re down for maintenance. When CJ had its reporting go out for about 2 weeks (over the holidays, no less!), they didn’t even put a notice on the site until at least 10 days into it.)