Sneaky ways that some clickbank vendors will steal your commissions

[Daniel08]

This is a long post, but if you use clickbank, you need to read it. I found this article about affiliate theft.

Most clickbank vendors are honest because they value their affiliates. But, there a few clickbank vendors that use these sneaky techniques to steal affiliate commissions:


Hijacking visitors

List building. Squeeze page is good mailing list generator, but in clickbank affiliate program, it is misused. For those who don't know, a visitor must signup and only then he is forwarded to sales page. What this means for you, affiliate? No signup, no possible commission. With signup, email of YOUR visitor is collected, and it is used for selling other products too. This is possible only on ClickBank - Free Lead. On other affiliate networks, they have to pay to affiliate for Lead too.

Anyway, percentage of affiliate sales (%refd) could be indication what vendor is doing with his mailing list. Signup, and check. If you are receiving newsletter with affiliate links (redirections), test that link. If that redirection contains your nickname, you can promote that product, your cookie will be set again every time when reader clicks on link in newsletter. If there is link to vendor's site only (clean url), that is nice too, but cookie could be deleted or overwritten in meantime. If there is some link to other product, that is really not nice.

(fyi: you can check to see if the vendor is doing this by signing up for his newsletter under your own affiliate link and then clicking on a link in the newsletter to see if it uses your link to go back to his site or not.)

Commission hijacking

It is well known that some affiliates and vendors are using spyware to steal affiliate commission. But some vendors are using old tricks to steal affiliate commission on their site. Today, when ClickBank Marketplace is updated daily, their position is going down (no affiliate sales), so it is easy to spot when is something wrong with that vendor. Below are some examples of commission stealing.

Read the rest here http://www.affiliatebeginnersguide.com/clickbank/hijacking.html

 

[Surfbay]

Wow . . . Very Interesting.

Oh my gosh . . .

Is there nothing that can be done to stop this ???

Do we contact Clickbank or what . . .

 

[Linda Buquet]

Another thing I've seen is alternate pay/checkout options. Buy Now goes through your hoplink to CB but they also have a click here to pay with PayPal or Google Checkout or whatever. Guess what - your hoplink won't give you credit if the buyer chooses to use one of the other payment options.

 

[Daniel08]

I've just busted one of them today. I was going promote the merchant, but first decided to test his links. He isn't even using clickbank, but yet he is still listed in the Clickbank Marketplace for affiliates to sign up and promote him. I am going to report him to Clickbank tomorrow. Please know that most Clickbank publishers don't do this. They know the value of having affiliates promote for them. Clickbank is the main merchant I use for all of my affiliate promoting. You can make more money with Clickbank ebooks than most other products because you get high commissions. There are very few shady publishers that try to rip off their affiliates. In the end, these people who rip off the affiliates are only hurting themselves.