clickbank vendor threatening me

Wow.. what gratitude! I'd love to have affiliates like you

Seriously, you should push that vendor off the first page completely. You made 35k, that's a lot of backlinks :p

If he said chargeback, he's clueless. He can only do chargebacks for stuff charged on cards he controls.

If he threatened to refund them all, ask yourself: What happens to his Clickbank account if he does that? Not to mention the amount of money he'll lose.


Paul

I don't know if he can legally do a chargeback, but I know I would definitely be looking for another product from a different vendor. You did exacly what a good affiliate is supposed to do, and IMO for any vendor to threaten you is absolutely unbelievable. No matter what happens now, chargeback or not, I would do exactly what you said - send your visitors to a competitor's product.

I've seen someones affiliate link at the top page for a product. Do you do this too?

One can do a chargeback only on items bought with one's own credit-cards.

He perhaps meant "refund", but even so, what he's saying makes no sense.

I don't know enough about your situation to be able to answer this. But among the things I'd be considering and perhaps wanting to do are (a) avoid confrontation/unpleasantness with him (this can only make things worse, never better), and (b) contacting ClickBank and discussing the situation with them and asking for their advice.

Just a question, but do you have any domain-names which might have any of the vendor's trademarks in their url's? (That might very much change how it's appropriate for you to deal with this situation).

Alexa.. I do have the product name in my domain but to my knowlage they dont have the product name trade marked.

Hi,

i am sure Clickbank would not love to hear that, report him to the Clickbank staff and they will send him a warning email

Thanks,
Zak

Correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't pushing the products homepage off the 1st result cause him to lose potential sales without having to pay an affiliate? Causing him to lose some money?

I would create my own product that was either better,
faster or cheaper and I'd redirect my traffic to a squeeze
page to build a list and then offer my product as a one
time offer.

Then I'd smile graciously as I banked my cash. ;-)

John

Most vendors will tell you outright that your success as an affiliate is their success as a vendor. I'd love to be able to sit back and know that someone is out there making us both tons of money without any work on my end.

Heck power vendors host contests to encourage these types of results. Some people just don't get it...

Thanks for the advise guys, I have send a email to clickbank but haven't heard any thing back from the vendor yet. He (or she) makes me feel like removing the affiliate link and uploading his product on my site and selling it for my self.. (i know this would be illegal and wrong) but they have me that angry.

I can't believe what I am hearing Thomas. Is he jealous for getting the lower commission and giving you the bigger cut? Well, I do not know what the case might be, but this is definitely a bust.

In my opinion, you should not try to bring his business down as an affiliate, instead, you can find alternative products to sell on your site and not dealing with such vendor anymore...

What's the product you are promoting?

Just a question: what would happen if the vendor now trademarks the brand? Does it give him the right to demand the domain? Or are the domains that are registered before, safe? Because, if they are not, then ANY successful domain without a trademark is in jeopardy.

I have heard from clickbank.. they basically told me not to take any action and they were going to contact the vendor in question. They also assured me that they wont let him refund all my sales.
Thank you all for your reply's and I will keep you updated on how this turned out.

I think the reason why hes all pissed off is due to your domain name. You said you had his product name in your domain name am I correct? He may think the only reason you got successful was because people are googling his product name which shows your website therefore making it seem that you aren't helping him at all since people already know about his product.

So in a way it looks like you're leeching off him. (Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm assuming base off the information you gave me).

As long as he didn't register his product name as a trademark than you're fine. You will always be able to keep the domain name and if he tries to screw you over you could always call his product a scam (Not sure if that is 100% legal without adding proof) or direct the aff. link to his competitor.

You're in control the way I see it.

First of all take a deep breath, do not implement what you suggested above, it's not ethical nor legal either.

With that being said my advice would be too just ignore him, just continue to make him money, he has a couple of options and they are both bleak he could:

A, charge back and pretty much get banned from CB losing money in the process.
B, lower your actual earnings which would result in nobody promoting his product any longer, thus losing money in the process.

Either way he won't do either so just continue to make him money, when push comes to shove he will not risk losing everything. Unless the guy is a complete moron and has no real business sense what so ever.

If that's the case move on and just promote something else, perhaps for somebody who will actually appreciate your hard work!

-Lee

I personally despise Click Bank so someone please correct me
if I'm wrong about how they do things these days but...

I don't even think the vendor can refund the sales. He/she isn't
the seller or the card processor. All he/she did was make the product
available for sale by Click Bank. Click Bank is the seller.

Really, surprised reading this thread ...
that vendor should be rewarding you instead!

wont do anything in your condition than to let clickbank know about the issue...

But Thom,
Just be rest assured that the vendor cannot charge back the sales you made of his product and cannot try refunds if he wants to keep his clickbank vendor's account.

Vicky Durel

LMAO

So hes threatening you for being a good affiliate lol I would be inviting you to sell other products for me

Regards
Dave

PS he cant do anything he is not purchasing the product so he cant do chargebacks

Is it because the vendor thinks you are cloning his website when in actual fact you are linking directly to him but through your own domain name?

If this is the case just contact the vendor and explain what you have done. If the vendor is still upset and threatening I would create my own guide complete with videos and other tricks he doesn't reveal.

Hire someone or create a competitive product yourself and make your money promoting your own stuff. Win for you. Lesson for him. What a moron he is!

Do a product review site and put HIS at the bottom.

He clearly doesn't realize how lucky he is to have someone like you promoting his product.

Whether I was ranking no where but had an affiliate making the money you state then I'd be smiling.

Part of me says STOP promoting his product, but then he might creep back up.

Legally he cannot actually do anything. He cannot get a refund himself etc.

Don't panic about it.

This situation is surreal. The vendor clearly doesn't understand what this game is about. Anyway, I advise that you continue making money as you are, and also branch out to other products. I'm sure some savvy product owners have already PMed you offering good commissions for promoting their products.

wow what a messed up vendor, the best he can I guess to take you out of his program, but it is his loss.. actually what you should do is create your own product, do not copy his product since it is illegal and not moral but create something similar and put your own ideas in it and start selling

in this way you will teach him a lesson and you will make more money, he is too greedy and wants everything for him so teach him a lesson and take control.

I think you guys are missing the point. The vendor's LOSING money because of him, not MAKING money! His site bounced the vendor's site off the top spots so his income has decreased dramatically due to affiliate payouts. It's sour grapes. He should reinvest some of those profits into seo

Wow, that was hilarious to read. He's threatening to create a chargeback? He didn't pay you via credit card, clickbank paid you, how in the world could he create a chargeback. There is absolutely no way he could initiate a chargeback.

The fact that he didn't reply to you makes me seem that he has no further arguments and won't do anything about it. If he says one more word I would suggest you take that conversion to clickbank and see what they think of it. They'll probably have a nice chat with the vendor .

I completely disagree with what this Clickbank vendor is trying to do. IMO, the threats are unfounded, and cannot be acted upon. This vendor's logic is that he/she will make more money off the organic traffic than they are making off the sales you are sending them. While this may or may not be true, it's irrelevant because it defeats the purpose of even having their product listed on Clickbank.

I'm not sure of copyright or trademark laws, or if they can come after you for using the name, but I'm thinking no since I see this done all the time and even have a few sites like this myself. Mine don't rank on page 1 of Google (wish they did), but they still make some good sales.

I hope this works out for you. Your hard work has paid off and infortunately, some people would rather be jealous instead of thanking you for promoting their product.

While this is not a place to get legal advice, it seems like jealousy and sour grapes to me. You have done nothing wrong here. As an affiliate marketer, you have put time and effort into promoting his product (which he gets half or more of every sale).

It boggles the mind as to why this would be a problem for him - he's making bank out of the deal. If he cared that much about rankings, then he'd spend some of the money he's raking in to buy some SEO services for his own site.

If I were you, I'd contact clickbank and send them a copy of his email and let them know you are following all of their TOS rules as an affiliate. Or, simply do nothing and keep a copy of everything to cover yourself in case of any disputes.

I personally don't think this vendor has a legal leg to stand on.

Keep making that money and enjoying the fruits of your smart work.

Hi Thomas.....if I was you I would offer him SEO services (for a fee) seeing as how you are obviously much better at ranking your sites than the vendor is.... :-)
Tell him if he wants to be above you that its fine by you as long as he pays you to get him there.
If he is not prepared to spend time and effort or money to rank his site then he can hardly blame you for the fact that he is sliding down the search results.

Imo, the vendor is bluffing.

His threat to "chargeback everything" indicates he's not too bright either.

I would just continue doing what you're doing.

Let him make some move before you act, which may be an overreaction if you do so now...
_____
Bruce

I would use this as a serious conversation starter to sell the website.

Offer him a sale price of 8-16x the monthly revenue.

I am afraid that this type of vendor can short change
an affiliate marketer not to get for commission that is
duly earned. Sincerely, if I know this vendor I will stop
promoting his product in case I am already promoting his
product. He is an ungrateful vendor.

How on earth will a vendor complain of an affiliate who
knows how to write a better advert or copy using his
internet connection, time. sleepless nights to fill someone
else bank account for work not done?

Crazy support from the warriors here, but listen to them Thomas don't do anything stupid that would actually hurt you in the long run.

What I would do is find someone else/ product to promote other than the vendor that is threatening you, not worth the time.

There is no way the vendor could get a charge back.The Threat by vendor is against the clickbank policy of affiliate membership. Did you take up this with the Clickbank?

The vendor is obviously wrong here, but I don't know why anyone is shocked with his anger.

Here's Thomas saying I knocked the vendor out of the top spots for HIS PRODUCT NAME and now I'm banking over $1,000 per day.

Let's assume the vendor is paying out 70% commission. That means he may have just lost $21,000/month to Thomas if the product owner had those top spots before. OUCH!!!

Did Thomas do anything wrong? No... But I'm sure not shocked the vendor is upset since Thomas is not promoting features or benefits, he's just riding on the product name someone else took the time and effort to develop.

If the product owner was smart though...he'd be contacting Thomas telling him about his most fierce competitors and offering a little higher commission if he can pull some sales his way from his competitors product names...he's found a ferocious competitor to help make sales.

If you used the the product name in your domain, then what you have done is illegal in the UK and rest of Europe where 'trading names' are protected from infringement (you will have to check elsewhere but I pretty sure it is similar).

Your promotion has been detrimental to their earning - you state yourself that your income shot up by 1k in a day, which mean they LOST that money as a result of someone infringing on their product name.

He was already on top of the page for his product name, so that money was previously all his/hers.

Anyone who would not be upset by that as a vendor amazes me.

Of course, we can say that someone like you would actually be a valuable asset to any vendor - but if you are only leaching from search terms featuring my product name, then I personally would not see you as an asset but a very misguided marketer.

Yes, I have made the assumption here that you have used their product name in your site - but don't listen to some of the advice on here. When you use their product name and do something 'profit from their 'good' name' - then you always run the risk of trouble.

That is why all the bigger companies never let you use their name in a domain or to target their main product name with adwords etc.

i do not even have to have my product trademarked - FACT.

That said, I have assumed you used the product name for your rankings. Also I do not believe the vendors attitude is professional, yet I do understand his issue with this (also we have not heard their version either). I personally would have taken you under my wing, explained that what you are doing is actually illegal in many countries, and helped to guide your skills to terms that I was not targeting, and thus MAKING me money which I would not have seen otherwise.

I also would let the 'product name review' site slide... I would only have an issue with my main product name site - but that is me personally.

I have checked and the product name is not trademarked. I am heading clickbanks word and not making any more moves until they sort the issue out with the vendor and I am still waiting the vendors reply. Not sure if the vendor is doing anything sneaky on his end or not but yesterday's sales were nearly $400 less than Fridays.

Venturetothetop- here in the U.S it is a common practices to grab productname.net, or .org if the product owner dont have them nabbed already. If they do have them nabbed than there is always productname(x,y,z).com and so on. As long as its not trademarked its fare game.

What a stupid vendor.. He should be proud because someone really all out to promote his product.

Actually --

I think the 'bigger' picture should be taken into account here, which a few people seem to be missing...

a) Was he already 'ranked' first in the SEO spot? And the 'only' thing you did is push him down four spots (with your top rankings)? While I am sure you are probably getting some other traffic that he didn't from longtail keywords -- I can understand his frustration/perception. I.e., without knowing the big picture -- I'd say he figures that he was "already" getting say $5k/month from top listings, and now he doesn't see any additional value, just that he is now 'sharing' revenue from a revenue stream he already 'owned'... I.e., if it is just "product name" in the search engines, then yes, I can see him being upset. But if you had other longtail keywords (i.e., a feature/benefit of that product), that was driving traffic/sales, then chances are he is getting extra benefit which you may want to point out.

2. If he really wanted to, he could refund all the orders. Unlikely, but possible. And he would be entitled to that (after all, it is 'his' product).

John

I would like to know the product name as I am sure many Warriors would. This is one merchant nobody should do business with.

Wow thats a little crazy...

This should be enough motivation for you to start considering creating your own product and ditch this fool.

The vendor can play it dirty by reporting you to Google. Depends on your links and what the person (if any) reviewing your site may think (thin affiliate site, spammy links ?).

Since you've outranked the product domain, then maybe, the vendor is not very good at SEO.

UP DATE!!

The vendor just called me (spend about 15 mins on the phone) after he got the email from clickbank he figured it best to give me a call. It seems his issue was NOT withe me out ranking him, But he thought I cloned his site. It tool me a minute to realize what he was talking about but I explained to him that I did not clone his site, and that I was using a plugin that display's any url i want instead of my own. I explained to him that because his sales page converts better than my articles I just had my affiliate link as the destination. Any one familer with Don and Jeremy's WP Core Conversion plug in know what I am talking about. With this plug in when some one goes to your site it is still yoursite.com but you can have any page you want being displayed, Still all google sees is your site and they cant even see the site being displayed. Once he understood this he politely asked me to remove the plug in and forget about the whole mess. He said he was happy with my traffic but wasn't comfortable with me giving the illusion that my site was the sales page. I agreed and "hopefully: things will be ok and ill still make bank with his product (even tho I wont convert as many sales now.) I must say tho, he was MUCH more pleasant to talk to on the phone than by email, He even apologized for calling on a Sunday.

Just to make sure I understand. With that plugin you are i-framing his sales page into your site, while obscuring the fact from Google? So, you are getting the SEO benefit of your articles, optimization, and SEO, but not showing them to actual visitors, they just get the sales page.

I'm not sure whether to say brilliant or devilish...

Cloaking.

You can always contact Clickbank with the threatening emails

Yes he could refund them all but if he did that I am sure clickbank would probably suspend him as it would look very suspicious.

I had a similar problem with a company and even though you aim to be on the front page of google you cant control the exact position that you could end up. They soon changed their mind though once I brought them a lot of business.

I would just ignore his threats and carry on as usual. And if you get further threats you could always write a blog post about them!!!

It seems some of you are shaming me for intentionally out ranking the vendor, Epically "thejustwarrior" you guys are flipping nuts. tell me, If you could would you like to out rank "the biggest loser site" for a key word like "the biggest loser meal plan" and also be an affiliate of the meal plan? hows that any different? Crazy, that is what some of you are! and the "ifram" thing, Im not to familer with the term but i asume it was somr kind of black hat trick back in the day. Look at it how you will but I dont see it as black hat, bottom line is i was sending them to that page any way, I just gave them a short cut. Vendor even told me that if I can figure out how to use the plug in and have it display his url instead of my own, then that would be fine....

THE JUST WARRIOR.. Ending this thread I want to address you. You seem like NOTHING but a low down piece of trash troll!! What, you cant make money so you go around telling every one else that they took the easy way and piggy backed off all the true affiliates? If you think that what I did was not hard work as you put it then I challange you to go out and take the top 4 spots for key words like "the truth about abs" or "the truth about abs review" do this in 3 weeks without out sourcing any thing but the articles and I will paypal you 5k! If its so easy then it should be a piece of cake right? NOTE: this was not the product I am involved with, but its was just as competitive as truth about abs... P.S If I insulted Steve (or any one that I did not know what they were capable of) I would be scared too. watch out, Steve Johnson is ex Black Op and is coming for you!

Those of you who gave me advise and helped me keep my cool in the beginning, THANK YOU!!
To those of you who think its wrong to out rank the vendor for product name, lol thats less competition for me and Im sure ill have a wonderful 2012 with what ive learned the past couple months.

Thomas

thomas1984, glad you got it sorted.

Couple of interesting take-aways from this one: it's a reminder of how dangerous text only (email, IM etc) communication is compared to voice - phone or skype especially video chat can really help defuse a situation.

It's a good reminder for vendors to think about and research their affiliate TOS in depth - this is a situation I haven't seen explicitly covered by any I've read.

And for affiliates, ensuring there's no violations of trademarks unless explicit permission has been given, and maybe developing a relationship with the vendor and finding out what's acceptable promotion and what's not.

Many vendors here, myself included, appreciate thomas1984's attitude and I'd be thrilled to have affiliates on board like him.

Use the 35k to make an exact replica of his product. Make it a blah blah is a scam come buy this instead.

In all seriousness though, its seems silly that he is ****ty. Why sell a product on clickbank if you don't want affiliates marketing it?

Normally any newbies should start-off as an affiliates, as they lack of experiences to drive traffic to their sites.
Base on your feedback, you are making a lot of money,
and it should be time to create your own products
and get people to promote for you,
at the sametime, you can promote your products
and keep all the money for yourself.
Do consider having your own products.
Goodluck.