[Merchant on CJ Affiliate] Is it worth the price?

Hello guys,

We are trying to scale our business through multiple affiliate marketplace websites as a merchant. I was on a call yesterday with one of the CJs' representatives. The contract is 12 months, and it will roughly cost us $8500 for the full year.
Compared to Refersion, for instance, the price is significantly higher (they charge $39 pr month). My question is, if there are any merchants scaling there, what are your experiences? What to expect?

Will this money be well spent, or might I just throw it in a garbage bin? All of these Marketplaces promise the moon, but with Referson, we don't see much movement with the 2 month period we've been with them.

Any input will be highly appreciated!

refersion is just a tracking platform, they dont actually bring you affiliates. cj has the network but if you just launch and wait for people to join, you will lose that 8.5k fast. the big publishers on cj only care about brands that already have high volume or if you reach out to them individually with custom offers. if you dont have a dedicated manager to do outbound recruitment on cj daily, its a waste. maybe look at shareasale first since its cheaper to get in, or just use that budget to hire a VA to scrape competitor affiliates and invite them to your current refersion setup.

yeah the tracking vs network distinction is huge. cj is basically a giant directory but a massive chunk of their active publishers are just coupon scrapers and trademark bidders who will hijack your organic traffic. if you pay the 8.5k, you also gotta watch out for their network transaction fees on top of that. if you dont have a solid attribution setup or a manager to decline the parasites, you will just be paying commission on sales you would have gotten anyway. shareasale or even impact might be a better middle ground if you want a network, but cj is a massive commitment if you arent ready to manage it daily.

wouldnt it be better to go to affiliate marketing events and hunt affiliates if you have one close to you or maybe even travel

cj reps are basically sales guys, they will ghost you the second that contract is signed. if you don't have a full time manager doing outbound recruitment every day you are going to burn that 8.5k fast.

if you want to scale, maybe stick with refersion for now and use that 8k budget to actually pay niche bloggers or influencers flat fees for reviews. or just hire a cheap va to scrape competitor backlinks to see who is linking to them, then reach out and offer them a better commission split. networks like cj are mostly just coupon sites stealing your organic search sales anyway unless you actively police them. save your money.

@Fluxify is right about the coupon scrapers, if you go with CJ without a strict manager you will just end up paying commissions on organic traffic you would have gotten anyway.

If you are not seeing movement on Refersion, it is simply because it is just a tracking tool, not a marketplace. You have to bring the traffic to it. Instead of giving CJ 8.5k, you could spend a fraction of that on ahrefs or semrush to find your competitors affiliate links. Just search their brand name, filter by outbound links, and you will find everyone promoting them.

We did this last year for a lifestyle brand and manually pitched about 200 of those bloggers. Got about 15 solid ones to onboard onto our Refersion setup and it did way more than any network directory ever did for us. It takes some manual work but it saves you the upfront fee and the network cut.

please suggest me i want to protect my ads , anyone can help me to choose right.

8.5k for a year is a lot to gamble on a network that wont do any recruiting for you. been on cj's merchant side and the rep energy disapears fast once youre signed, thats not a meme its just how it goes.

the coupon scraper thing is real but you can mitigate it with commission tiers and just blocking the obvious trademark bidders in your terms. problem is you have to actually enforce it weekly or it eats your margin.

honestly your refersion results dont surprise me. two months with no outbound is gonna be flat anywhere, the platform isnt the bottleneck, recruitment is. before you sign anything for a year id test the manual route everyone here is pointing at... pull competitor affiliates, pitch maybe 50-100 of them, see your reply rate. if you cant convert handpicked bloggers with a good offer, cj's directory isnt gonna magically fix that, youll just be paying more to have the same problem.

if you do go cj eventually, do it after you have someone whos job is literally recruiting daily, otherwise the 8.5k is mostly access you wont use.

One thing I’d check before signing anything is whether your offer is even attractive on paper for affiliates. CJ guys with real traffic look at EPC, conversion rate, AOV, cookie, payout speed... not just “brand looks nice”. If you can’t show numbers yet, most decent pubs will ignore you and you’ll get coupon/toolbar junk applying all day.

For 8.5k I’d rather prove the affiliate pitch first. Build a simple partner page, make 2-3 custom offers, manually recruit 100 targeted sites/creators and see if anyone bites. If that doesnt work, CJ won’t fix it, it just makes the same problem more expensive. Also try negotiating the contract length, 12 months upfront is rough unless you already have someone managing it weekly.

one thing nobody mentioned, the 8.5k isnt even the real number. CJ usually stacks a network access fee plus a percentage override on every transaction on top of whatever they quoted you. so that yearly cost is just the door, not the actual spend once sales start moving. ask the rep to put the full fee structure in writing before you even think about it, half of them conveniently skip that part on the call.

the refersion thing... two months flat is normal, you basically rented a tracking pixel and waited. thats not a platform problem.

if i was you id do the manual competitor scrape route first but honestly dont pitch 200 like some people do, thats a slog. pull the top 20-30 affiliates of your closest competitor, the ones actually ranking and sending traffic, and just give them a stupidly good custom offer. higher commission, longer cookie, maybe a flat onboarding bonus. you only need a handful of real ones to outperform a whole network of coupon junk. once you prove you can close handpicked partners THEN a network makes sense cause youll know your offer converts.

12 month upfront with no manager is just paying for access you wont touch.

one thing that gets lost in all the recruitment talk... before you even pitch anyone, look at why refersion went flat. was it zero outbound or was the offer just not landing. cause if you had even a little traffic and your existing partners arent producing, thats data worth reading.

the competitor scrape route everyone is pointing at is solid but i'd add something. when you pull those top affiliates dont just look at who links to your competitor, look at how they link. a guy with one buried text link is different from someone running a full review page that ranks. the second type is worth 10x the custom offer and you can prob count them on one hand per niche.

on cj specifically, the 12 month lock is the part i'd push back on hardest. ask for a 3 month out clause or quarterly. if the rep wont budge on that its usually cause they know the first quarter is dead without your own recruiting and they dont want you bailing once you see it. plenty of merchants sign that and just eat 8.5k learning the same lesson the manual route teaches for free.

honestly the network isnt a bad tool later, just not as a first move when you cant show epc yet. prove the offer converts on handpicked people, then access starts being worth paying for.

nope
kick their ass and invest those $8k in ads for another aff program, the sea is plenty of fish

yeah those cj reps are brutal with the yearly lock... what i would do before spending that cash is set up a simple lander on your site targeting competitor affiliate program keywords. like "competitor brand affiliate program alternative" or whatever. you can siphon some of their active affiliates who are already looking for alternatives. keep refersion for the tracking since it works and is cheap, then just redirect that traffic there. once you have some actual volume and know your epc, then you can negotiate with cj from a position of strength. right now they just see you as an easy signup.

Yeah @SMM Junction is right about the hidden fees, CJ will nickel and dime you on the network transaction overrides. If you are already struggling to get traction on Refersion, dropping 8.5k on CJ is just going to make your budget disappear faster. The directory doesn't do the work for you.

If you want to try the competitor poaching route that @JaxonWP mentioned, don't just send cold emails offering a slightly higher percentage. Most decent bloggers won't switch tracking links just for an extra 2% commission because changing links is a hassle and they don't know if your landing page even converts. You gotta de-risk it for them. Offer them a flat tenancy fee for the first 30 days... like fifty bucks or a hundred bucks just to swap the link and test your conversion rate. If your EPC is actually better than the competitor, they will keep your link up. If not, you only lost a few hundred bucks testing real traffic instead of 8.5k on a yearly contract.

CJ can work, but only when you already have demand affiliates can monetize. If your brand search volume is low and you don’t have proven EPC, most of the “activity” you’ll get early is coupon sites, extensions, cashback, and random approval requests that look busy but dont move new customers.

Before signing, ask them what publishers they will personally intro you to in first 30 days, not just “access to network”. Get names/categories in writing if possible. Also set your terms tight from day one: no PPC on brand, no coupon unless approved, no toolbars, no commission on existing customer if your margins are tight. Otherwise you’ll spend the first quarter paying for your own checkout traffic.

I’d keep Refersion for now and use a smaller budget to prove your offer with 10-20 real content partners. Once you know EPC and conversion rate, CJ becomes a negotiation tool instead of a gamble. Right now 12 months sounds like paying rent on an office before hiring a sales team.

I got my question answered it seems. I joined both Refersion and Awin and coupon websites are 98% of the affiliate requests we got.

0/10 would not recommend