Hundreds of thousands adverts shown for CJ merchant for not a penny in compensation

[Azam.net]

Tweet

I have complained for months that I thought the 'Quote of the Day' link provided by the Brian Tracy '21 Success Secrets- FREE CD' was not working. I was told by the Brian Tracy Affiliate Manager that it was working six months ago.

However, after having queried it again and again, they have now admitted it was not tracking. They have now removed it from the network.

They are refusing to compensate us for showing hundreds of thousands of their adverts and not earning a cent in commission because the tracking was not working. Our emails are not being responded to. The phone number on their site for affiliates is dead.


It was not our fault THEIR link was not tracking, so we should they get free advertising on our sites?

This has made be furious: they are a wealthy company and I shouldn't have to pay the price for their ineptitude.

I would ordinarily have accepted it as just another disappointment, but I have been tricked, conned and lied to by too many 'respectable' merchants online and will not allow another internet company to scam me.

There are just too many merchants out there who just expect affiliates to put up with tracking not working. Because they can hide behind the anonymity of email, they can get away with enjoying free exposure on affiliate sites without paying up the promised commission.

What can we do?

[999gi]

I sympathise but the bottom line is that you should have pulled it after 1 month whether it was tracking or not as it clearly wasnt earning you anything

Ive pretty much lost what little tolerance I used to have for incompetent merchants. If I dont see results with a week I send one email, by the end of the second week if things havent improved then thats it.

[Azam.net]

Yes, I was a sucker for trusting CJ's tracking and believing the merchant when they emailed me six months ago to say the link was tracking.

Thank you the response. This matter is going to be taken very far as I have finally received a response from the Affiliate Manager saying "I could just as easily turn this around and say you are trying to con me by trying to get commission on sales you didn’t make."

They have gained free advertising on our sites, don't even have the decency to offer us a few dollars in compensation, and now say they could accuse me in return of trying to con 'em?

I have been in affiliate marketing full-time for seven years and have the utmost integrity. I can't believe this merchant has the audacity to come back at me like that.

She just expects me to back down and accept it. I would have - had this not been the squillionth time a merchant has tried to wriggle out of paying me my hard-earned commission through some tracking flaw. Just received confirmation a few minutes ago that the search box for thehut.com at CJ doesn't track - you can view the HTML code there for yourself and see it doesn't have any affiliate code in it apart from the 1x1 pixel. We showed that thousands of times as well for no reward.

[purple]

I understand your upset Azam, but i agree with the other post, I would have pulled the promotion much earlier than that.

I tend to give them 1000 UV before I pull them, sometimes I could be being harsh, the good thing about the market now is there is usually a alternative for every merchant.

I personally would not have left it 6 months before pulling a promotion however much a merchant told me it was working if I was not seeing commission coming through I would pull it.

[ashagplz]

i dont think thats the point. If you directly asked if tracking working and was told it was, yet they have not paid anyone for 6 months so must have known it wasnt tracking there is a clear case there. To come back with the rematk they did would be fuel on anyones fire.

[purple]

Agreed merchant in this case is wrong, but we do have some power to pull promotion of these merchants from our sites, as Azam says he gave them 6 months free publicity. The issue re compensation is between the affiliates/ network/merchant so I can't comment on that

Life has become much harder for me personally so i cant afford to promote any merchant for 6 months with no return. Feedback from forums like this are useful to see if its just you who has problem or if many others do.

[ashagplz]

i know the point you are making and im sure with hindsight he feels the same, but it remains an aside to his point. If you do happen to leave a non-tracking url up, and you are told its working, and the merchant has sales for which you have not been credited then what? The reverse case, where sales are shown to have tracked incorrectly are always reversed by the merchant, are they saying its a one way deal?

[purple]

I agree with what your saying, and this is something I am sure Azam will bring up with CJ / Merchant.
Cases like this increase the call for a Affiliate Union or Group. If sales have been made via leads from a affiliates website you should be rewarded for this.
We as affiliate want to work in partnership with networks and merchants for common gain.

[Qui Gon Jinn]

Whether it's 1 day, 1 week, 1 month or 1 year.

A network is meant to be a "trusted third party solution" isn't that part of what the overide is for.

[jewellery_tv]

Azam.com I also sympathise with you on this one. As a merchant I know how important the affiliate network is and we (jewellery.tv) value each and every single one of you.

We ourselves were very nearly in the same situation as the merchant you mentioned, through no fault of our own. However unlike in the merchant you mentioned, the minute we were told there was a possible problem we did every thing we could to resolve the issue and assure the affiliate we would go through everything manually if there was no other way of fixing the problem.

After the issue was resolved by the affiliate program (this was not CJ) we quickly formed an excellent relationship with a now very grateful affiliate. From this, they went on to drop all the other merchants in our catagory because they had so much faith in us. To say we were surprised by this is and understatement, but it had proved an excellent PR exercise. However, we know what would of happened if we had of taken the stance your merchant did.

Although it has always been our policy to suppport affiliates and help them where ever possible this example really reinforced this to us.

To any merchants who read this, ignore your affiliates at your peril.

To Azam.com, there is still plenty the merchant could of done. Most merchants use their own sales tracking software (as we don t usually like relying on other peoples software) and even those that don t usually use web stats. Even these can simply report traffic in from a referer then by viewing orders unallocated to the affiliate networks and applying a bit of conversion rate logic it would be very easy work out approximately what is owed.