Product launches that have a Sold Out Page soon after launching - Is this Right?

Is this a scam? Owners got affiliates to drive traffic to their sales pages and put up a Sold Out page so that they can keep 100% of sales revenue.

There's another reason, and it doesn't have anything to do with some kind of phony scarcity or sneaky commission tactics.

It doesn't apply to all products, but where it does apply, it's perfectly valid.

I just got done observing the launch of a $x,xxx product which involved personal coaching, along with group sessions and collateral materials. There were xx spots available. The launch period was supposed to be a week, but the spots filled in two days. The launch was shut down, and the waiting list page went up.

The program in question ran for twelve weeks, if memory serves. After that, the vendor will re-open and attempt to fill another class from the waiting list. Perfectly legit.

Personally, if I were to offer such a class/coaching combo, I would not be relying purely on a cookie to protect the affiliates. I would need a way for the affiliate ID to ride along with someone from the launch list to the waiting list, so that if that person buys a spot in a later version of the course, the affiliate gets paid.

That's exactly what I used to think about the very comparable situation of ClickBank vendors collecting potential customers' email addresses from their sales pages ... until I tested and analyzed a randomly selected cross-section of them for myself and discovered that that was what was happening in 85% of those cases.

You'd think not, perhaps, looking at it superficially.

But when you look in more detail, you realise that a vendor offering 75% commissions has to steal only 20-25% of the leads to double his own income.

They can do that without "the hand that feeds them" even knowing about it.

And that's why they do it, and how they get away with it.

They're not stupid enough to steal all the leads, but it's dead easy for them to steal a very small proportion of them and thereby double their own incomes, without even raising suspicions.

You just have to test these things for yourself, to see what's going on, rather than relying on the "fact" that 80% of their incomes come from affiliates - which isn't actually a fact at all: it's simply a casual assertion of the kind people love to repeat, which in reality one can neither prove nor disprove.

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Oh, well, that magically makes it all ok, then, doesn't it? Let's all just get together and agree to ignore the fact that some vendors are collecting the email addresses of our targeted, pre-sold traffic (which we generated as affiliates with our skills and time and effort and energy and money) and that we have no realistic way of checking whether we actually get paid for all the affiliate sales we make.

I mean to say: if Jeff Walker says it's ok, then it must be ok, mustn't it?!?!

Call me a skepchick, but I never quite know whether to laugh or cry at such naivety.

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I didn't say this, Drew. They weren't all product launches (though some were). They were simply products offered on ClickBank that included a vendor's opt-in on their sales pages. I'm not claiming that this was the identical situation to the one being discussed in this thread, merely an analogous situation, in the sense that they were all vendors collecting the email addresses of the affiliates' traffic before a sale had been made and the affiliates paid.

The very point that the OP started this thread to discuss, in other words.

I've posted a lot about it, here (but in 2009/10).

Briefly, I subscribed (as a "potential customer") from their sales pages, using the opt-in box provided, with a different name and email address for each, and monitored carefully their entire series of promotional emails, counting the proportion who at some point sent in one or more emails a different ClickBank affiliate cookie which overwrote the existing affiliate's cookie, thus attempting to deprive the original affiliate of a commission on any subsequent sale. I was dismayed (and extremely surprised, in my then-naivety) to discover that this happened in a remarkable 85% of cases.

I don't claim that the same thing (or anything effectively similar) would necessarily happen in 85% of the instances we're discussing in this thread - I have no way of knowing that and I don't pretend otherwise.

I'm saying only (a) that I suspect, from my experience of these things, that it may be considerably more common than many people might imagine, and (b) that assertions that this or very similar scenarios are "a rarity at best" (as stated above) are only guesses, and (c) that I won't myself be promoting their products because I prefer instead to promote the products of vendors whose tactics don't give me this potential worry.

It's something we each decide for ourselves.

Call me a skepchick, but I find it a very easy decision, myself: the term "no-brainer" springs immediately to mind.

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Thanks for your replies, just to clarify this was just a question/observation I made and was in no way aimed at any product in particular

I guess to put it another way,would YOU spend your time and money sending traffic to a product that appears to be closed most of the time?

If so then obviously it would make sense to check first, that you will still receive your commissions when it re-opens.

Also when a visitor lands on the "closed" sales page and if they do decide to enter their email would their not be the chance of the vendor losing a sale? it'd be interesting to see the percentage of those who opted-in that then go on to purchase the product when they are notified that the product is available again?

Maybe there's a difference between using genuine scarcity and using it to catch visitors emails?

The operative word, there, is "if".

As an affiliate, you have no way of knowing whether that's reliably going to be true.

In the highly analogous case of the ClickBank products mentioned above, it wasn't true, 85% of the time.

Maybe that wouldn't be so, in these instances, but nobody who's posted in the thread, so far, has offered any explanation of why they imagine it wouldn't be.

One thing's for sure: it's an uncertainty - and serious pro-affiliates (i.e. the ones who make most of the affiliate-referred sales) tend to be the ones who avoid trying to build our businesses on unnecessary uncertainties.

That's exactly what this is, when the "closed for now but give us your email address" page is up: it's a promotion of which the vendor is collecting some of his affiliates' potential customers' email addresses before they've bought, as a result of which the affiliate can lose her/his commissions on the sale.

That's called a "leak", in affiliate parlance.

And for all the reasons explained in this slightly different but essentially completely analagous situation, that's something that almost no serious, pro-affiliate will promote.

This is an absolute "no-brainer" of a decision, for an affiliate: the simple reality is that we have a choice between promoting products that give us this potential leak, and (plenty of) products that don't.

How much easier can a decision be?

It makes no difference at all whether they happen to be "evergreen products" or "launches": in both cases, when this happens the vendor is collecting some of his affiliates' customers' email addresses before they've bought, which is the most classic form of "leak" there is.

Yes. Absolutely no disrespect at all, Gluckspilz, but it seems to me that you missed the significance of the leak.

Anyway, affiliates unfamiliar with this situation, who want to understand what can happen when product vendors collect the email addresses of our prospective customers before the customers pay - and why some vendors do this - need look no further than this fine thread, in which about 100 successful affiliates explain it clearly and openly enough.

All I can do, here, is keep saying the same things over and over again - that's the way when people keep missing the point. And gone are the days when I'll stay in these threads and argue about it for ever.

Ultimately, these discussions nearly always end up causing ill-will, because in a situation in which other people can steal your commissions, if you say so, vendors posting in the thread also feel threatened and insulted and think you're getting at them personally (neither my wish nor my intention, needless to say!).

When that happens, the answer to "I don't do this any more because people can steal from you" just becomes "If you don't do it, then you have no experience of it, so we're not interested in what you have to say on the subject". How's that for twisted logic? You methodically and objectively test, and you prove that it pays you to avoid an often-deceptive practice, and then having done so apparently disqualifies you from commenting on it, precisely because you now have the sense to avoid it!

And yes, people really sometimes do resort to saying things like that, eventually, when they have no other points left to make! See for yourself: there are people saying that in the other thread (in which about 100 affiliates explained their perspectives of situations in which the vendor is collecting some of his affiliates' potential customers' email addresses before they've bought) and I can already hear people thinking it, in this thread, too!

As I keep on saying, "it's something we each decide for ourselves". John McCabe put it very well, as ever, above, when he said ... I don't often know and trust them enough, myself, to do that. I think that's the only difference between John's position and my own.


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Thank you for adding some common sense to this absurd thread.

Oh well, that settles it conclusively, then, of course: just one instance of one marketer of his stature doing that clearly proves beyond all possible doubt whatsoever that every single instance of this practice is entirely innocent and legitimate, and that no affiliates ever lose a proportion of their commissions from it ... curious that so many other pro-affiliates seem to feel so differently, though: they must all just "not know what they're talking about", I guess?! After all, if they don't promote products under these circumstances, then by definition they don't have experience of it, right? So their opinions, however well-reasoned (and/or even any independent research showing that they're often right) can't possibly be worth listening to, can they?

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I'm afraid not, Jeff. It really isn't that simple at all - far from it, in fact: respectfully, the point you're missing is that the vendors doing this are stealing typically something like 20%/25% of the sales (even that can double their incomes, of course, if they're paying 70%/75% commissions), their affiliates normally don't know or find out about it at all, and therefore it doesn't follow that "you're not going to get any support the next time you do a launch".

Vendors are typically quick to allege, in such discussions, that "if they cheated their affiliates, they wouldn't have any affiliates left", but unfortunately this is mistaken logic, the reality being that their affiliates (unless they check very methodically and painstakingly, in some of the ways I've described above - which of course almost nobody does) don't know that they're being cheated.

The "logic" is assuming something (i.e. that affiliates would all desert such a vendor because they'd been stolen from) that simply isn't true (because the reality - of course - is that they'd do that only if they knew, which they don't). Nobody is suggesting that such vendors steal all the leads: that would give the game away and obviously they're not stupid enough to do that, and they don't need to do that if they can double their own incomes by stealing quite a small proportion.

Of course it's easier to assert this than to prove it, and that was why I did the research mentioned above, so that I could prove how very commonly it happens.

Sorry that it makes some people uncomfortable to discuss it, but that's how it is: it's simply factual that this is a widespread practice.

Anyone wanting to duplicate my sort of research can test it and see for themselves.

There's a limit to how productive a conversation can be on this subject when people haven't actually done that, as I have. It's kind of a debate between "fact" and "opinion"; between "objective reality" and "theoretical belief", isn't it? I'm perfectly happy, myself, to discuss it with anyone who wants to keep the conversation going, but I can't help feeling that, ultimately, it's perhaps of rather limited value to anyone else?

Meanwhile, though, if people continue to allege that "vendors don't do that because you wouldn't have any affiliates next time around, if you cheat them this time around", I'll continue to correct that mistaken perception, to discourage other affiliates from accepting it as factual, or indeed as "logical", when it's actually neither.

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Pretty sure the topic was supposed to be about the use of sold out pages as part of the product launch process, but somehow it veered off course.

With apologies, in response to that, I could only repeat what I've said in posts #47, #50 and #52, above, and that would clearly be unhelpful because you seem to be ignoring it completely. The discussion has become both futile and sterile, in my opinion.

On a brighter note, I do think that affiliates (and potential affiliates) reading the entire thread carefully enough will have no great difficulty in deciding for themselves whether or not these are situations in which they want to become involved - and ultimately, as I've now mentioned so many times, that's something we all have to decide for ourselves.

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