Is buying products with your own aff links allowed?

I have never done this but I was wondering if you are allowed to purchase CJ items through your own affiliate links thus getting a discount on the purchase. Is this allowed? Either way they still are making a sale, right?

 

I do not think they pay the comisson. You could have a friend buy it on your link and make the sale and get the comisson.

 

its not against CJ rules if you do not make fraudulent purchases.

It depends of your advertiser, normally it is allowed

 

I have the same question before, and according to CJ's reply to me, it is allowed to for publisher to do a testing sale.

But if u really want to build a long term relationship with CJ and your advertisers, I think u should consider before overly doing that

 

I think that some of them have the system that when you sign up for an account they log your IP and if anyone trys to buy something with a CPA link with that IP it will not pay out.

Duno? Has anyone got money off a product from buying with their own links?

 

When I bought from my own link, it is counted and commission was paid, but since it's an accident, I contact the advertiser immediately and he/she said it's ok. But I only do it once, never do that again.

 

I heard of people doing this and I'm sure it's a gray area. But in the CJ Publisher Service Agreement, Section 1 (PARTICIPATION IN PROGRAMS), Item D (Prohibited Uses of Links), Sub-Item ii (Non-Bona Fide Transactions), there is a note indicating the following:

"You may or may not be compensated for Transactions where You or Your agent are the Visitor. "

Since it's a "may or may not" situation, I take this as being a gray area. Good luck.

 

I've purchased a couple of items through my own links and been paid. One was from ebay and the other was from a shop. It was good to know that both suppliers were reliable and that I could happily recommend them to my visitors. I can't see anything wrong with this.

 

I've got money back using my Cj link for purchases. Its worked for GoDaddy - Petco - Snowshack and a few others.

 

I have also purchased products through my affiliate links. They pick whether to credit it to your account or not so it is really up to them. I have known people getting in trouble for things such as leads that you need to do free trials and people will get many friends to sign up and cancel their credit card on it giving the person a few hundred dollars easily, now that kind of stuff is illegal but if you are just purchasing stuff through your link I really see nothing wrong with it.

 

Someone mentioned IP Tracking, but I'm not sure how that could be tracked actually. Many IPs are dynamic, sometimes an IP represents many different people/computers. I think cookies would work, but you could always blow out your cache before clicking on your own link, which I assume is on a different server.

On top of that, if paranoid, go to work, the library, a friend's house (VPN or SSH for the lazy) and buy something. I highly doubt they'd go through the trouble to search a company's sales records to prevent a $6 commission from going through. They'd have to search by home address, phone # or something. Plus, I don't see anything wrong with it anyway. For instance, fatwallet.com encourages people to do this to some degree with their fatcash system. So you could always use their system and get essentially the same commission in most cases.

Amazon might be slick enough to track that stuff, because they run their own affiliate program.

 

I usually run test leads on CJ and one time they emailed me about it and I told them what I do and it checked out ok on their end b/c it showed up as only getting one lead from that IP. They told me as long as you don't abuse it or do it all the time, it is ok. I only ever do it on offers that I am going to be bidding higher on just to see the ease of the transaction.

 

Many web hosting affiliate programs will not pay commissions if you order the product yourself. It's best to check with the affiliate manager first, before purchasing.

 

Some of them allow, some dont. Ask the affiliate manager before you buy.

 

It's up to the merchant. Some don't care, some do. It usually depends on what it is. I buy domains through my godaddy link, they don't care.

 

anyone know of the webhosting co's that do allow it? with the large payout amounts it makes sense that they wouldn't but am looking for a new host so a nice payout would work as well...

 

I wouldn't recommend you to do this.

 

Like a few other users said, it's a merchant by merchant basis. Just contact them individually before you do any purchasing, and you will be fine.

If you have already made a purchase and been credited, still contact them. A few dollars on a DVD you bought isn't worth losing partners.

 

yea im pretty sure your allowed to do that.

 

We have bought from our affiliates and have been paid for the sale. Part of our buying from our advertisers is to test the system. When you spend $75.00 to earn $18.00 I dont think they will be upset.