>>but sometimes owners of product do little dirty things
not sure how they do it.
There are lots of ways to do it. For example, I was recently promoting a ClickBank product and I discovered some strange things happening on the vendor's landing page. I did a little research and here's what I found...
In theory, when I refer a potential customer to a CB vendor then the CB cookie gets dropped with my aff id. If the potential customer leaves the site and comes back later then my cookie should still be valid (unless another affiliate refers them there in the meantime).
The value of that cookie is important if the vendor has an autoresponder, or something similar to convert the visitor if they don't buy on their initial visit.
Ok... all that you already know. But this particular vendor is cheating his affiliates. If you go to his sales page without a hoplink (i.e. the visitor types in the web address later, bookmarks it, or is brought back by an autoresponder email) then the vendor does a server-side redirect back through his own ClickBank hoplink and overwrites my cookie.
Basically, if the visitor doesn't convert on his initial visit from my link then the vendor steals the commission back.
Now, I know that the initial visit represents a large majority of conversions... but I'm still screwed out of any future conversions that should be mine. If another affiliate grabs them then that's part of the game. But the vendor shouldn't steal from his own affiliates.
The crappy thing is that my cookie gets stolen even the user just refreshes the page while they're on the site.
Needless to say, I stopped promoting that product. If the vendor's cheating up front like that then I don't want to know where else I'm getting jacked.
Another possibility that happens with a pretty good number of vendors is multiple carts. Then all they need to do to bypass CB (and the affiliate) is take the visitor to a PayPal checkout and keep everything.
Usually something like that works the same way... if the visitor comes from a clean (non-hop) link then the payment is processed through a different merchant account to avoid the CB fees (which are higher).
I don't think all merchants do it maliciously (the vendor I was promoting was absolutely doing it intentionally), but the effect is the same... they take commissions that belong to their affiliates.
Anyway, that's 2 examples of how an unscrupulous (or unthinking) vendor can mess with your commissions even though they can't control ClickBank's tracking or checkout.
