Clickbank Marketers' Underhanded Tactics To Funnel Away Commissions

I agree this is a problem and it's increased dramatically at CB in the past year or two. Seem to me what happens is one or two sellers try tricks like this while other sellers say "I wouldn't do that - it's not right".

But then when nothing bad happens to the tricky sellers, others decide to join in and it becomes "a method".

kay

Have any of you actually contacted Clickbank about this? They are a real business out in Idaho and they actually have a REALLY great team of customer service reps. I would report these vendors to them directly... it's a direct infringement on their contract with Clickbank.

Underhandedness? Cheating? Tricks? Stealing? Not necessarily. Welcome to the real world.

Visit most ecommerce sites and you will see an option to get on the merchant's mailing list.

The purpose of the mailing list? To promote the merchant's products. Obviously.

Do affiliates get commissions for merchant email promotions? Generally no.

Isn't building a list something mentioned over and over?

I don't recall affiliates being "entitled" to a "leak proof" sales page.

Especially with ClickBank. Are you kidding? The king marketplace of buyers substituting their own affiliate links, or getting refunds just because they want something for free.

Maybe online merchants should not be allowed to offer sales by phone? Or in a physical store? Those sneaky, underhanded thieves!

In that context some of the vitriol on this thread is out of place.

Some ClickBank merchant landing pages are ONLY a squeeze page. Yet, commissions still manage to get paid after a person opts in, gets on the email list, and later orders a product.

Perhaps the "issue" was a matter of your ClickBank affiliate cookie not initially getting set. It happens.

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On the other hand, yes, there are cheating scumbag merchants on ClickBank who will use tricks to overwrite affiliate cookies with their own.

This may be one of them.

It is odd that the 'referrer' at the bottom of the order form was not the OP, or simply 'none'.

Is there anything in the ClickBank contract about this? Perhaps not directly, but it is called breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. That is, an implied term in contracts that everyone will act in good faith and not try to undercut the benefits received by the other.

You could report the merchant to ClickBank with a detailed outline of the commission theft. Mention "breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing", fraud, a FTC issue, and ask for compensation from ClickBank or termination of the merchant.

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This is really bad - as a Clickbank vendor myself I have never understood this.

As MOST people new to Clickbank do not understand how gravity works - as a vendor I always go for the more the better in terms of getting your product seen.

So if I have a good affiliate that makes xxx sales a week why would I not want them to do that?

In fact when I promote my products on the web I always just use a direct link and this helps affiliates because if they send traffic afterwards they get commission.

Chris

No affiliates = Less Sales.

If a page leaks, simply don't sell the product. Don't hesitate to contact the vendor and tell him that. I agree that such practices are very shady since for the Affiliate its not always obvious where his link goes.

I've noticed this as well over the past couple years.. I even posted about it 2 years ago

I actually prefer a sales page that tries to get opt-ins - they sell a lot more product.

But I always opt-in myself before promoting, to make sure that not only do they not use their aff. link in their follow-ups, but that I am cool with their other promotional activities. Every now and then, I will find a good one that not only leaves your aff id intact, but appends it to all of their promotionals emails for their other products!

Take-away: ALWAYS opt-in to the vendors list to make sure that you are cool with their follow-ups, etc.

they a few of the vendors who do this by mistkae but far more of them on purpose

Make your own sales page dont use the vendor page
Details provided here Click for instructions

If there was another affiliate link there, it probably wasn't the merchant, since, AFAIK, you can't be an affiliate for your own product (nor would you want to be; there's no point...unless, of course, he was using another CB account (with a different ID) as an affiliate in an attempt to boost his gravity).

Either way, the sad/funny(?) thing is that it's REALLY easy to set a page up so that you can have fancy-schmancy list building stuff (or anything whatsoever) appear to all visitors EXCEPT those referred by a Clickbank affiliate.

It needs 2 or 3 lines of PHP per instance... at most.

Tommy.

I have been moving away from Clickbank for over a year because of stuff mentioned here. I think you are better off making your own product and not having to worry about people who are less then honest.

There is a super easy way to address this: Contact every single Affiliate of the offending Vendor. Send them emails telling them the Vendor is stealing $$ from those Affiliates. Make sure to provide them proof. Create a Youtube video of your test that shows how the Affiliates are losing $$ due to the dishonest Vendor.

Watch how fast those Affiliates stop promoting that product.

Watch how fast the Vendor starts losing cash.

Offer to sell the Youtube video rights to the vendor for big cash (Before you cry about this, it is perfectly legal and moral to sell material that details your negative feedback. It is not extortion, it is not blackmail. It is perfectly legit).

End result: Vendor pays for being dishonest.

Super End result: If people start doing this over and over, the industry will self correct, and Vendors will be scared to piss off their Affiliates and will choose to do the right thing.

2 of the products I promote on ClickBank have this "leaky" sales page and they both convert reasonably well.

The first directs people to an opt-in page and one of the 1st few auto responder messages urges them to call an 1800 number where they can buy the product over the phone.

The 2nd product's optin promotes a CPA offer on a dieting product (physical - not done through Clickbank) and then another eBook by the author on another site altogether.

I still promote them both because just about every 100 hops nets me a new sale. I've thought about bypassing the opt-in and seeing if my conversions increase or not but I'm really lazy and have too much going on to screw up a good thing.

Also - these are just 2 products. The rest of the products I promote on CB aren't leaky at all. I guess I'm just in friendly niches. It's the same products I've been promoting for a long time and the sales pages get tweaked but nothing that could rob me of my affiliate checks.

Is this all happening in IM/Forex/Biz Opp niches? Those niches royally suck and are too much of a headache IMO.

I spend way too much time browsing through the CB marketplace (I know, need to get a life) and only see this sort of stuff every now and then. But then again, I tend to always avoid IM/Forex/BizOpp stuff.


-Vikram

I another way Clickbank people still sell , is by doing a pop up box that has the product for cheaper price when exiting site, also known as down sell

I must admit that i don't do CB that often so this comes as news to me.
Judging by the response CB gave the OP they don't seem to care very much
when it comes to vendor's ripping off their affiliates.
So, why not publish a list with all the vendor's who are guilty of stealing
commissions?

Cheers

That really sucks and that is the reason many CB marketers don't push offers with optin boxes. I think the vendor thinks he or she is clever and I understand why they do it. Because that way they make more money but most importantly they can push gravity up to be higher on the Clickbank directory.

I've seen this in many occasions, I also did what the OP did by throwing an email address to see what they do but most importantly if they respect my affiliate link. My advice is to check this soon and don't regret later when you are sending profitable traffic and not making as much sales and profits as you should been.

This angers me. I'm still relatively new to this game. I can't believe how crooked people can be.

I'm tempted to hire someone to go through every product in the weight loss niche and give me a list of all the offenders (if there are any).

There should be a sticky thread wall of shame somewhere on this forum. If CB don't care to police this (and I'm not blaming them), then we should warn people ourselves.

If you know of someone doing this, your silence makes you a contributor to the problem.

Speak up. Tell people who they are. You'll make more money in the end when they start losing sales and are forced to clean up their links.

I've discovered a lot of CB vendor playing this game. That is why I don't send any visitor to their sales page. If possible I will not want to use CB. I've found some vendor only interested to grab the clients' email and then sales is done through mailing and also some only interested to get the clients to click on adsense.
Actually you can easily create a sales page and check out from your sales page.
Hope this help

Am I allowed to say scumbag on the warrior forum? These people should be named and shamed. It's a deliberate attempt to screw affiliates.

Paul

Just because a couple of people have already mentioned this, the Blake board has a 'name and shame' forum, at

"Name And Shame" Forum

That might be a good place to get a list going of vendors who do this. Just doing it in a forum lets anyone add any vendor they happen to run across. I can add an interesting trick I've noticed, but it is a bit different from this topic.

Have to hand it to Tony Blake for something like that. That forum has been up for years.

Another take away I got from your post Anne is that we marketers, as business people, cannot get complacent. Either we or someone on our team should be double-checking all links, payment buttons, check up on products we're promoting, etc.

I caught one of my affiliates selling one of my 400 page ebooks as his own recently. Well, the first thing I do in cases like this is to contact them via e-mail (by phone if I have their phone number) and state the facts without getting emotional or angry. In a nutshell, I advised him to cease and desist or that there would be legal action. He stopped, of course, but now my affiliate manager has to monitor this person.

He's no longer an affiliate of mine and has been black listed from doing business with us again. But there just doesn't seem to be end to these kind of tactics. It makes it very difficult to trust people.

RoD

If you are promoting "Instant Passive Profits" you will never see a dime in commissions. This vendor is currently redirecting all affiliare links to his affiliate link for Copy Paste Systems. The problem occurrs when the vendor also sells other affiliate products. What I recommend is that you periodically check your affiliate links to make sure they are not being redirected to other products. That is a sure sign the vendor is over-writing your cookie. As for opt-in pages, if the vendor is trustworthy, he will not over=write your cookie in his autoresponder series but help you to close the sale because CB cookies are good for 60 days. The only thing to do is to check his autoresponder series by signing up to make sure your cookie remains intact. In my opinion if the customer doesnt buy from you affiliate link within a week or 2 they will probably never buy the product

Brilliant! A simple, yet effective way to get rid of those pesky affiliates!

Quite a while back one of my IM campaigns with CB, I would put in my affiliate link and check it every thing was right. Two or three days later went to check it for no reason at all and found it had snipr page or something similar and no affiliate link at the bottom, so I fixed it up. Three days later the same thing happened to my 2 links again.
Probably being green asked CB support and they were very helpful and they fixed the matter.