CBRocket - A Temporary Limitation (Updated)
CBRocket is our PHP script that lets your web site visitors to search ClickBank without leaving their site. And set up targeted text ads. And all the links to the various ClickBank products, in both cases, are tagged with your clickbank affiliate ID, allowing you to earn commissions on sales.
A customer wrote to me recently with a limitation that has just arisen (because of recent changes at ClickBank’s site), and my testing has now confirmed it. When you log-in and ask CBRocket to retrieve the latest Clickbank marketplace data, CBRocket seems to only be retrieving the first 100 listings from each subcategory (subcategories are things like “Marketing -> Promotion”). This sounds like perhaps CBRocket may be leaving out a significant chunk of the ClickBank marketplace - but as always with computers - things are never quite as simple as they first seem.
- When I just tried CBRocket on the marketplace, it did retrieve 5729 unique items, plus a further 1916 duplicates. I don’t yet know the number that should have been retrieved, but it does not sound like a vast number of items have gone missing.
- Many subcategories contain less than 100 items - items in these subcategories won’t be affected at all.
- For those subcategories which contain over 100 items, items 101 onwards are often duplicated in other subcategories which do contain less than 100 items. So, these types of items also won’t be "lost" either.
By "lost", I mean that CBRocket is not retrieving these items from the ClickBank marketplace to its database, and hence these items won’t be displayed in ads or search results (although of course other items would be). At this exact moment, I can’t say that no items are being "lost", but neither can I yet say that any items are actually being "lost". I simply don’t know yet - although my gut tells me that the chances are, a few items are being "lost".
Anyway, I’ve examined the problem, and it should be fairly straightforward to fix. We expect to have an update to CBRocket within a week or so. Check here for updates, and don’t be afraid to email us if you have any questions.
Update:
I’ve done some more testing. It does seem a fair number of lower ranked items are affected - I guess the ClickBank marketplace had grown even faster than I realized. According to my data, there are now 8365 unique items in the marketplace, plus a further 3641 duplicates - which means that 2636 lower ranked items are currently not being retrieved. This would correspond to items which rank below 100 in all the subcategories in which they are listed.
Anyway, the good news, is the planned fix appears to work fine - so we should hopefully (fingers crossed) being able to release a fix within 1 week, and perhaps a bit sooner.
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