Please read this before calling clickbank cheaters or crying for help

I think at this point I'm more interested in understanding the psychology of people who always come into these threads and imply that Clickbank affiliates and publishers are insane, stupid, or lazy marketers for observing the various Clickbank problems.

What's that about?

All you need to do is to open your eyes and read what is being discussed here, on multiple blogs, even on the Warriorforum as of this past week, plus lots of other forums. Are we all bad marketers? Are we all stupid? I don't think so. You're lumping everybody into a pile - and your assumptions are wrong.

I do admire you taking the time to look at things statistically - at least from your point of view. However, it is by its very nature a limited point of view because there's no way you can see what's going on beneath Clickbank's dashboard. And something very stinky has been up with them for a LONG time.

As both an affiliate and a publisher I know for a fact that I've had many commissions stolen from me.

In the case of my publishing account, I use e-junkie, a third party delivery service, to deliver download links. When THEY notify me that a sale has gone through CLICKBANK's payment servers, triggering them sending a download link to a customer, and I AM NOT CREDITED FOR THAT SALE AT CLICKBANK then something is definitely wrong. Compound this with the fact that in some such occasions a customer has personally emailed me to thank me for the product or ask me a question about my ebook or ereport - and I doublecheck my records at Clickbank and have no record of them purchasing. Sure, maybe they could have downloaded it from a torrent site or something. But when the two things are happening together:

1) Ejunkie's download process is triggered by a payment sent through Clickbank AND
2) Right after that the customer thanks me for the product and asks me a question about my report

What do you think is going on here?

My sales commission has disappeared into the ether.

This has happened several times.

On the affiliate end, I have a couple of different affiliate accounts that appear to be in that category of what many people have observed - extremely consistent periods of a) flat zero sales (even when a big promotion is going on and I'm sending lots of targeted traffic b) mixed in with periods of "normalcy" where my conversions come in at a statistically trackable rate - sometimes 1/50 converting, sometimes 1/100 converting, sometimes 1/200 converting. And then it goes down to 1/5000 converting? And it does this consistently in this totally glitchy and weird way.

Anyway, I still advise people to promote other stuff. I do much better with selling physical products, even in completely saturated niches, even in niches that are supposedly being horribly affected by the recession. All of these perform better than e-products for me. Although the ebooks I am selling using Paydot.com and ejunkie all have my "normal" conversion rates - that is, what USED to be normal at Clickbank when Clickbank was working properly - 1/50, 1/100, or 1/200 conversions depending on the product.

Dan

 

Well. I never tried to pop the hood and see what's brewing inside ClickBank. I can't and I don't believe anyone on this forum can. Well, not unless cmpotato can support his claim of "seeing clickbank stealing from his account with his own eyes" with something solid.

I merely demonstrated that most if not all of the sales fluctuations can be explained by natural causes.
I'm willing to buy CC fraud theory, given that web_18designer stated here that in 2 years not 1 sale vanished on the publisher side. While it may prove little about affiliate side of the matter this is one solid fact that was stated.

I'm yet to see a thread that accuses ClickBank of stealing and has solid measurable arguments in it.

This is neither solid nor measurable. Why? Because I don't know:
1) What is an "extremely consistent period of flat zero sales"? How long is it? How may hops etc?
2) How big is your "big promotion"? How do you decide that your traffic is "targeted"? Same keywords doesn't mean same measure of "targetedness" by the way.
3) What is "normalcy"? How long are these periods and how many hops, sales and $$$ do you pack per day?

I'm not asking you to spill all your commercial secrets here but without at least some of this data, statements like "my sales suddenly dropped" or "no sales in 3 days already" in reality state nothing.

Some screenshots posted in other threads here make me assume 1-3 sales per day on average. So on mere fact that this affiliate had 3 days without sales it would be a long stretch to assume ClickBank is cheating. As shown above it's highly likely that several other affiliates would have a drop in sales on the same day and of course they'll post in these threads confirming ClickBank's wrongdoings.

If ClickBank were to be caught cheating it would ruin it's business in a day. Just imagine a class action suit that would follow and the compensations that would be paid. Would the want to risk an established business that has been raking in more than $1,000,000 in net sales every day several years now for a short-term profit increase? I think not.

 

Well I am not in position of saying CB is fraud or not but I can

THANK YOU for this website.

Very useful!!!

 

Instead of selling products, you can use CPA, lets do some simple math!
CPA often converts at a much higher rate, espescially when you are allowed to use incentives.
a email submit often pays $.75 ~ $1

If you need 10 articles to make a $22 dolar sale, why not use 10 articles to make 22 email submits, this is much easier to do, you wil keep motivated as you will see results much faster and you can even outsource it ...

just my 2p

 

http://ripoffreport.com/reports/0/421/RipOff0421649.htm

i am so worry about what this guy says ( because in my account there is 200 hop with no sales at all )
can any one explain what is going ?? are clickbank really rip-off and cheat us??

 

Anything can happen.. I always though of emailing all the vendor's to see what their stats look like..

Just an opinion.. Clickbank isn't cheating

And if they really are there is no way an affiliate could ever even think of getting behind Clickbank's offices or bank statements to track their sales..

There's nothing to do about it .. and they can't get caught. All we can do is to promote their products ..

 

Interesting, although there is something in the fact that when people often switch their accounts, they immediately get a new spike in sales. This has happened to many times (As documented on this forum) to ignore it.

Something is definitely up behind the scenes, this RIP off report also confirms this too. Clickbank have some good looking products on offer, they just need better tracking.

 

Adamwestrop,

Problem with these reports is that definition of "immediate" and "spike" tend to be somewhat fuzzy. Also it's unclear what would have happened if they didn't change the account.

A good way to test is would be not switching to another account but rather randomly diverting 50% of your visitors to a new account and if then you would observe statistically significant difference in sales between two accounts, then you can claim that perhaps there's some issue related to the account.

It's not that hard to do, but will somebody do it? No.

I think that people are prone to believe in conspiracy theories because for them it's more comforting to think that their lives are governed by some kind of purpose or genius (even if it's an evil one) rather than blind chance and ignorance.

 

I think the only way to really see for your self is to buy a CB product with your own aff link. Thats the only way to be 100% positive about whats going on. This is a cheap CB product 5.95 total, with a 2.25 commision leaving 3.70 out of pocket (well thats if CB pays you the commision lol) so just try it gheese, the only way to be sure without breaking into CB and holding everyone hostage making them show you their bank account records. go here

http://yourafflink.sierraphoe.hop.clickbank.net

CB is stealing my sales?? well proove it! get a video of you paying then check your sales.

Of course the next reply will be CB only steals commisions worth more then 20 bucks or something like that.

 

No-one is ever gonna know for sure, unless they do an experiment themselves and if they do an experiment and report back, no-one is ever going to believe them.

That rip-off report confirms that full affiliate commissions are not getting tracked and just ask around lots of people confirm that opening up new accounts works for getting more commission.....I rarely read this section, however have seen lots of confirmation from members of this....I am sure if you started a new thread asking people to confirm this, I am sure a lot of people would come forward.

 

I always wondered how is Clickbank able to track hops/sales when their domain is down. They always state that all the sales are being tracked even though they're down..

Once the domain isn't online (whenver they're on maintenance or anything else) there is no way to track sales (it's obvious) ..

My sales fluctuated a lot since I started promoting clickbank years back.. However I believe an affiliate has to be sending at least 800 - 1000 hops daily to see a constant amount of sales daily and here's why...

Assuming your product converts in 100 - 150 hops -- If there is one day you get less than 150 then you are most likely to make 0 sales..

 

precious007,

it's obvious that you have no idea how software works, your knowledge of statistics is also lacking.

mere fact that reporting doesn't work at the moment doesn't mean that sales are not recorded.

of course it's always easier to blame somebody else...