[Ralph Slate]

I sent this question to CJ via their support link about a week ago, with no response other than the "we've received your email" mail.

I use CJ's SID to track the country (using GeoIP), IP and date/time of each eBay transaction.

On March 22, I got the following two transactions:

Lead, from IP 66.157.168.93, click date of 3/12, 11:19am

Sale, from IP 66.157.168.93, click date of 3/12, 11:19am

The lead is still unqualified.

CJ's click date is identical across both transactions. The event date of the bid is within two minutes of the registration.

If you look at the item number listed in the bid , the bid was entered at the time corresponding to the event date of the bid. The bid was placed by a brand new user.

When I look at my server logs, I can see that this user (from Louisiana) was browsing the hockey cards of players from the Bossier-Shreveport Mudbugs (Louisiana hockey team). The item won in the auction was a Quade Lightbody hockey card, a player for the Mudbugs.

The registration remains Inactive.

When you look at the UserID of the lead, it doesn't match the UserID of the sale, which explains why eBay didn't activate it. Yet the IP is not an AOL pooled IP address; it is the address of an ADSL line in Louisiana.

This would appear to be a severe error. I have a lead which should have been qualified, but it was not. CJ hasn't responded during the "72 business hours" that they promise.

How much faith should I have in CJ's data? Here's an obvious problem. How many unobvious problems exist?

Any thoughts how I can escalate this with CJ?

Ralph

[Ralph Slate]

I think I'm getting close to pinning this issue down. I think it has to do with when eBay clears the cookie.

From what CJ has told me, and from what I can gather independently, I think that a user went to my site, clicked on the eBay link, started the registration process, and then abandoned it, perhaps because he tried to use a hotmail account which requires a credit card. He then registered under a different email account, and bid.

I think that the cookie was cleared before he got 100% through the initial registration process, or perhaps the userID in the cookie was set to the abandoned account instead of the account that he finally registered under.

I'm wondering if this could be the reason for so many inactive registrations -- that the registration process has a point which forces users to start over, thus resetting the process and negating the commission?

Ralph