Clickbank Sucks

Christopher @ January 20 2009

Also thank for the e-junkie heads up. I didn't realize they had an affiliate program. I'll definitely be trying them out. I've been using PDC for a while now. Good call on actually emailing these people first. I made a few sales with some program and didn't get paid. They're not responding to their emails nor is PDC. They have quite a few things for sale. I assume they just went idle because I usually go after products in niches that aren't highly promoted and less popular. I'm assuming that they're just idle, not a scammer, but they could be. Every other publisher has paid me, on time.

Dan @ January 20 2009

Hi Chris, Yeah if you look around e-junkie and check out what merchants are offering, SOME of them will also offer an affiliate program through e-junkie (not all.) Again, this is where emailing the merchant is useful because I find the merchants very responsive to paying me if they know that I'm about to bring out a promotion helping them out, etc. They pay their merchants like Paydot.com - it varies by merchant when they pay but the turnaround time is very reasonable - usually by the end of the following month after you made sales for them the previous month. Sometimes they even pay you around the 1st of the following month or the 15th, it depends. And yeah, I'm really flabbergasted at how all the little IM birdies keep chirping their denial about the fact that Clickbank is a criminal at this point - they keep kissing up to them hoping to make sales. And the big guburus aren't being honest about how bad it is because then they lose affiliates. Anyway, thanks again for your updates here on the blog! Like you said, logic dictates that that rush of great sales followed by day after day of zeros doesn't make sense. And it's TRULY suspicious that right after you emailed them before you got sales within a few minutes. Same thing happened to me back when I first complained to them in early November. It's like they magically pulled a few sales for me out of their ass and credited them to my account so I'd shut up. And then after that, zero sales again. My one publishing account gets about 2500 highly targeted hops from my affiliates monthly now. I'm lucky to see one sale a month since CBk crapped out in October. I'm just going to use e-junkie now but unfortunately I'll have to kiss those affiliates who have been working hard for me goodbye - and of course there's no way to contact most of them. You're right. Clickbank isn't a business. It's a bad joke. Dan

Major Hop Outtage | Clickbank Sucks @ January 23 2009

[...] My Formal Email to Clickbank [...]

Dan @ January 19 2009

Cool letter! Not that it will help you any. Clickbank is so deaf to more than reasonable complaints. I look at a "real world" example (since Clickbank doesn't live in the real world, or likes to think that they don't.) If I'm doing a JV with a list owner and the list owner wasn't getting credited with sales they referred, they'd blast my name all over the Net and make sure that everybody knew I was a dick and never worked with me again. And rightly so. He might even report me to the Better Business Bureau or sue me for lost commissions. Clickbank honestly thinks that people aren't going to do this, that we haven't figured out what's up. Insane. I seem to be on an opposite schedule from you. When you reported here that the taps were on and you were making sales, my publisher and affiliate accounts reflected big fat zeros. When you said they dried up again, I suddenly got a suspicious trickle of sales, all on the same day, to both accounts. Then nada again. Sales patterns and buying patterns just don't work that way. Clickbank is so hosed as people wake up to their bullshit. One poster at a forum (Maybe DP?) said something about Clickbank may be "batching" sales. This is when they manually run sales through their system all at once, to save costs on their own payment processing fees. But as I understand it Clickbank's payment processor is actually Paypal - not a traditonal credit card processing account as you'd find with, say, Authorize.net or whatever. So I don't believe Paypal allows batching. I don't think anyway. Well, thank you for this blog. I check it every day to see what anomalies you're experiencing because nobody else is publically posting their daily experiences - you just get sporadic reports of CB not working, not the daily scoop. I've switched most of my stuff over to Paydot.com (but I contact the vendor first to make sure that a) they still exist and b) they know I'm watching them if they decide not to pay me. And I also sell downloadable stuff as an e-junkie affiliate. Both of these lines of products are converting like my former Clickbank links did, without the problems. Just FYI in case you want to try it. Best Dan

Christopher @ January 20 2009

Yeah, I know Clickbank won't respond or do anything different with this email, but I still feel the need to write it. They seem to lack logic and rational thinking, so I can only assume why an affiliate died off. I want them to know that it's over because they suck. I think it's all about the real world that CB just doesn't understand. Things need to get done properly. Sales need to go through. We do JVs. We have bills. We live in the real world. We need our money and this absolute crap with the payment processor has dragged on for long enough. 24-48hrs is as much time as any normal business would allow this to keep going on for. I wrote the email in a very specific fashion: we are both independent businesses. I'm here to make money and they're here to make money. For us both to profit and succeed, both of us need to be firing on all cylinders. I'm not interested in games and lies. I put the ball in their court because they're the ones that inevitably have to make the choice. I can deal with low commission days. I can deal with making $17.98 everyday. It sucks, but I can deal. What I can't deal with is zeros. I can't go day after day after day after day of zeros. It's bullshit. It's just so sad that I actually have to email a business and say "hey, could you run your business properly instead of like a retard?" Is it really so much to ask CB to just smarten up, start thinking about profits, instead of pissing them away on whatever fuckin' thinking that makes what they're doing okay. Nothing pisses me off more than stupidity. I just don't understand what is going through the people in charge there. It makes no sense. Maybe since I took a lot of math and physics courses that I understand the concept of problem solving better than them, but seriously, this isn't rocket science. I know they outsource everything, but if your payment processor isn't running up to high standards, you fucking find a new one. DUHHH! Like how much brain power does that require. Fix the damn thing. Don't fucking go into denial. There are only two reasons why they haven't fixed it because these can be the only two.... 1. There is literally a fucking monkey in charge of operations. 2. They're broke and can't afford to fix it. These are the only two plausible reasons. It's just a big fucking joke. I know everything is outsourced and that's fine, but fucking outsource to good businesses. They're so far out of the loop that they can't identify major problems and destructive things going on. How can people run a business like that. It's like running a fast food joint without ever knowing what is going in the cash register. Absolutely useless if you don't pay attention to the money. It boils my blood. The most important aspect of their business is the payment processor. It has to work and work good. If that doesn't work, everything else is falling apart. It's the nerve of the things they say. I go from record sales, to a week of zeros. Write a complaint email and start making sales within 6 minutes of them responding telling me there is absolutely no problem. oh God. Fuck you Clickbank. My ass there is nothing wrong.