Clickbank Bans A Loyal Affiliate With Highest Violet Rating. Watch Out.

I've been with ClickBank for many years. Never had any problems and always been paid on time. I have a very low refund rate and everyone has always been happy with my sales. When their colour coded rating system was introduced I immediately hit their top violate status. My account had the lowest risk. To be honest I was expecting this since 99% of my traffic was highly targeted PPC.

On January 17th 2013 I went to check my stats and realized that I have not made any sales for the last 2 days. I could not see any clicks either. Something was not right. I clicked on one of my hop links and saw the following message: "This site is no longer in service or has been disabled due to a terms of service violation.". I looked at my payment history and saw "SUSPEND" next to the most recent payment. The worst thing is that I continued driving paid PPC traffic to their hoplinks for the last 2 days spending almost $200. They did not bother to call or email me regarding my account being suspended. They just suspended it without any warning or notification.

I opened a new support ticket asking for explanation and patiently waited 3 working days. No reply. A few days later I decided to email CB Security and after a while they did reply with "Your account was suspended due to its relationship to account "xxxxxxxx". Now I've never had any other accounts, never logged into any other account nor have I ever coached or advised anyone on any CB marketing. I've explained the situation and like in the previous case with the ticket I've created they did not bother to reply.

The worst thing is that a few months ago I've spent $1800 pushing a people search offer with life long recurring monthly commission. It did not really convert that well but I figured that I will get my money back in the long run anyway as it continues to generate revenue every month. In fact recurring billing has generated me $51.96 since yesterday. So my leads are still generating monthly commission, the people search vendor is still sharing agreed % but it's ClickBank that's keeping all this money.

If you have been with ClickBank a long time like me and learned to trust them, start spreading your eggs between multiple baskets because you never know when they decide to throw you out like a piece of junk without even bothering to notify you or deal with you. I have 15 years internet marketing experience and I've never had to deal with a more pathetic dismissal.

Here are a few ClickBank alternatives that pay you instantly via PayPal each time a sale is made.

JVZoo, Rapbank, Payspree, Mooshpay, Digiresults, Paymentchamp, Jennyclicks

 

Depending on the amounts involved it might be a good idea to contact a lawyer and have them contact Clickbank on your behalf. It would appear from your post that they have wrongly associated your account with another. That seems like something that could be cleared up with some additional effort.

 

Wow. That seems pretty dirty for ClickBank to do. Sounds like the customer service isn't much better. I hope this doesn't happen to me.

 

I actually signed up with a couple CPA networks so I could have commissions in places other than ClickBank after they started their rating crap. That's pretty terrible that they don't even let you know that your account is suspended!

 

Did you ever hear back from Clickbank? This is rather alarming...

 

What was the account they believed you to be associated with?

 

I feel bad for your situation man! Mine was red and then back to green after I was penalized some fee. I don't think the current rating system is right because as was my case, I had a product that I sold 4 copies only where 2 were refunded. And Maybe the refund rate is 50 percent but they need to consider that the sales IS 4. I asked why and never heard from them.

No the affiliate manager I believe needs to be an affiliate himself b/c then he understands lots of things.

BTW have you lost much in your acct - not paid?

 

That sounds bad.
I can say it is the first time I read such a report.
I hope it doesn't become the norm such as reading about adsense bans.
The wall communication sounds exactly the same as with adsense. And there's only a certain amount of time you can spend trying to communicate with a wall before you give up.

 

Thanks for the info on the paypal programs, I am going to join a couple of them to avoid any problems with changes to cb

 

That sounds awful, really sorry to hear about this.


There have a lot of changes going on at CB lately, and the recent website UI update is all part of a plan to clean up the image of CB. Wouldn't be surprised to see them get acquired very soon here.

Great advice to others, always smart to not put all your eggs in one basket.

 

Recently I noticed that the monitoring color code is gone in my account. I asked some guys in WF and it is gone in their acct too. Maybe their latest feature has been disabled for creating a meSS.

.. update..
They have just created a tab for risk management

 

I bought a clickbank site from here actually, a great test prior to launching another product. After just 3 months I will be selling the site. Don't get me wrong, it does fine, but I cannot stand clickbank's lack of support. Example I had someone double pay, gave refund, but they still counted it against my refund percent, cost me 4%.

However I will say I did learn a ton on price points that helped me a ton. But I will be selling the site soon and launching the other product in another way.

Anything they do does not surprise me. Sad story...

 

I would agree with the first reply. Contact a lawyer, who may hopefully be able to get Clickbank to listen long enough for your account to be reinstated. I hope you have kept proper documentation on your activities for promotion... Clickbank is a large company and they are bound to make mistakes- just as Google Adsense and other programs do. They don't care too much about the people driving the traffic to their offers.

 

If you follow the rules with Clickbank your account will not getting blacklisted...

 

I've always questioned clickbanks ethics. Especially since I remember few years back there was a craze for those data entry programs which ended up being nothing but affiliate training. Clickbank banned every single one of them that used to be in clickbank except for "Legit Online Jobs" which always seemed strange to me seeing as it's almost identical to the others. Now They have "Real Writing Jobs" in their database which shows up #1 and has so many complaints everywhere about being a scam (I believe Legit Online Jobs & Real Writing Jobs are possibly both owned by the same person.) Then I read in Warrior Forum about a person who submitted the same type of writing program to clickbanks marektplace and said they would not accept it but when the girl asked why they let Real Writing Jobs in they would not give an answer. Almost seems to me as if they are almost being bought off. (Just my opinion.) Anyways I think clickbank is extremely shady.

 

Yeah, clickbank are getting strict nowadays.., i agree, try to follow their rules and you won't get your account banned..i got a warning e-mail from them, read the terms and conditions, found out what i did wrong and everything has gone smoothly since.

 

Yikes. So sorry. I hear these horror stories about PayPal or ClickBank banning people who didn't do anything, depriving them of money they earned. It's interesting that those sites pay instantly.... I haven't really every fully promoted, properly I mean and made profits, a ClickBank product--I'm interested in Commission Junction too. But I'll be wary of Click Bank now. Thanks for the warning.

 

Clickbank is against spam.

They are strict because the FTC demands it from them, a few other new comers have the same rules as CB.

In over 10 years I've had ZERO problems with clickbank.

I don't know the intention of this thread, but unless I see proof that the person in question wasn't spamming then I'm not believing this.

Don't believe everything you read, could just as well be clickbank competitors.

Also if the matter is so important why not just give them a call?

All these years clickbank never had bad reputation, if you are innocent then simply call them and prove it.

If you are doing anything that goes against FTC then the FTC has the right the shut down clickbank for good, those rules are there because the FTC forces them upon clickbank, not because clickbank is bad.

Thousands of people on this forum and others have made money on clickbank, let's not bite the hand that helps us.

 

I had a problem with my account and I contacted clickbank and they got back to me within 2 days and they fixed my account right away.