Thank god for the warning. As soon as I saw the title, I immediately took down all of my landing pages and articles. Let me get this straight -- so you mean to tell me that there are actually dishonest vendors out there? There are actually people that will get you do to the hard work for them and then keep all of the profits for themselves? And they do this by -- wait for it -- clearly displaying an opt-in box on the website that you are promoting and then using the email addresses that they gather to sell their product themselves? My mind is absolutely blown. I'm glad that I was wearing my special helmet. Little sheep. Big farm.
Think about it.. If all vendors would steal their affiliate's commission then they would get nowhere. If a product doesn't convert well in couple thousands of hops then something definitely is cheesy.. I would second your opinions, and there might be some vendors with such practices, however sooner or later their own business will be affected, nonetheless they better not do it. Al.
@tnt7973 You've posted here because you are feeling guilty. And you are accusing me of lying!!! I'm a very soft person by nature and I don't want to use harsh and bad words. Period. I have already checked all the email follow up messages from you and all the links don't have affiliate ids[affiliate=none]. People, check for yourselves and you can find that I'm no lier. (%refd -53%) I really get mad to see vendors who steal other's hard work and money. I'm not going to promote your products and I believe even vendors giving 50% commission to affiliates are far better than people like you who promise 75% commision and steal 100%. Lesson learnt: Stay away from dishonest and unethical vendors
What's worse is that Clickbank knows about this and other methods vendors use to steal from their affiliates but for some reason, refuse to do anything about it. This is either incompetence and/or intentional, but either way, borders on the criminal since they refuse to act in a systematic manner to wipe out this type of fraud. In my mind, if Clickbank knows that vendors are stealing this way, and do not act for whatever reason to prevent this, it's just plain stealing.
Daniel I think you do not understand how clickbank and hoplink cookie works If you clear the cookie or open another browser how on earth do you want clickbank to still know you visited the sales page before??? The cb cookie is the only one giving you the commission, there's nothing wrong with vendor emails.
Duh, could this by why some affiliates setup their own 'squeeze' landing page, and then link directly to the CB cart? John
I always check if the link is right. But i dint knew about that thing of the mail. Got to pay more attention to that. Thank you
I never promote any products that have opt-in unless it's very good and yes we need to test the optin link
Now almost all vendors (reputed ones) have opt in forums. Programs like become a blogger and such are open only once a while and all the time we refer people to them when they are not open, sign up for the notifications and we lose sales. this is one problem with affiliate marketing. more and more marketers are adopting the same technique and so I am not suprised if the affiliate commissions go down the drain in a few years
Oh my god! I just thought (When i seen this thread).. haven’t checked click bank in months ill check it. Got 4 sales @ $19.24 ! LOL
Well you won't face a problem like this if you promote quality products but still you didn't tell anyone the name of the site who used this trick!
just optin @ vendor site and see what kind of mails you receive. :-/ CB should have some sort of policy against vendors doing such shameful things. optin form on vendor site = good vendor trying to rob affiliates of their hard earned money = bad. products should receive a temporary ban or something and if the problem persists totally removing the product from CB. just my 0.2$
And how will that help you?! What matters isn't what sort of emails you receive: it's what sort of emails other people receive. You don't imagine that vendors do this with all their leads, do you? That what you see will necessarily be representative of what your future leads will see? Besides which, you'd have to opt-in to the vendor's autoresponder sequence for 60 days (the duration of a Clickbank cookie) to know with certainty, wouldn't you? And only decide to become an affiliate after that. And then just hope that it never changes in future, after you become an affiliate! Who needs all these problems?! CB should have many things. They should have reliable affiliate tracking. They should have a customer service department that replies to emails. They should have an attitude and behaviour-pattern different from the "we never make a mistake, everything is your fault" mantra they always regurgitate. But they don't. We all know this. The subject of this thread isn't news; it's history. The question is: can you make a good living by being a CB affiliate in spite of all these things which have never changed and are never going to? Fortunately, the answer is yes! Incidentally, in this case, I don't agree with you that CB should have some sort of policy against vendors doing this. That's just passing the buck. Trying to make something CB can't control or enforce into CB's responsibility. Wrong answer. They're bad enough at what they do already without trusting them with something additional and unenforceable! It may sound hard-hearted, but I'm afraid the commercial reality is that people who are naive and gullible enough to become affiliates for products that have a vendor's opt-in on the sales page get what they deserve. There are over 10,000 products on CB. You don't need to promote those products. I started making a living on CB the day I realised that (about 7 or 8 months ago now). By the way, there are subscription services available now that automatically notify affiliates (lazy ones like me) of which products have "leaky sales pages" (i.e. vendor's opt-in), obviously to be avoided like the plague, and which ones are safe to promote. Vendors are always quick to claim that this problem is a very rare one, that "most of the time" it's perfectly safe to be an affiliate for something with a vendor's opt-in on the sales page. My experience and that of many of my clients, is very different indeed. The only objective, undeniable truth is that nobody knows for sure. I can live without taking a chance on it, myself. I have 10,000 other products to choose from, after all.
I am web and tech savvy, But really I don't know how vendor's would be able to steal commissions as long as the browsers are responsible of carrying the cookies for 30/60 days .. and nothing else.. Can anyone get more in details/ only if they know what they're talking about. Al.
Hi Al I think that I know what I'm talking about but try not to be too mean if I state the obvious or you disagree. I am here to make friends and I'm not into fighting back and forth unless someone is a true moron. You are correct that the browsers carry the cookies for 30/60 days and one would think that this protects our commissions. However, I have found many vendors actually send emails to prospects with their own hoplink (from a second account) in the email. Once the prospect clicks on the link, the cookie that is set takes the place of the cookie set with your hoplink. Additionally, I have seen vendors (after clickbank approval) that have the email opt-in "submit" link (or every link on the site for that matter) actually reset the page to the URL with their own hoplink (from a second account), again replacing the cookie tracking your hoplink with a cookie that tracks theirs. Does this make sense? Anyone have anything to add?
Well of course the affiliate cookie stays in the browser that the customer got the cookie in. If you open the link from the opt-in e-mail in a different browser than the one you were cookied in, of course that you're the affiliate won't get credited, unless the e-mail from the opt-in contains your affiliate link, which never happens. Most of the times the vendors just have the URL of the page there, so that when the visitor revisits the page, the cookie of the affiliate stays there, and the aff gets the commission. If the customer however, opens the link in another browser, than the affiliate won't get commission. It is a bit tricky with the opt-ins on the pitch pages. They can improve conversions, but they can do a lot of harm as well. Go to cb-analytics.com, look up the producy you're promoting, and check the '%refd' percentage for the product you're promoting. It represents the percentage of affiliate sales for the product. A good referred percentage is around 85% or higher. So if the vendor has a referred percentage of 85% it means that 85% of the sales were generated by affiliates, whereas 15% where 'no affiliate' sales where the vendor gets the whole commission. If the vendor has a low referred percentage, it might indicate that something is wrong. It doesn't have to necessarily mean that the vendor is doing anything wrong, but it is something that you need to take into consideration when you see something fishy.