Clickbank-Something is Really Wrong Here

Gogetta,

Thanks so much for returning to this thread - Clickbank IS actively shaving commissions, and if you look carefully at webmaster forums everybody is seeing this. My belief is that they don't go after the big guys so much, the big earners, or the big guys simply aren't willing to talk about the shenanigans they see going on in their accounts because then they would lose affiliates. The only guburu I've seen admitting that this seems to be going on in his own account is Chris Rempel who calls it like he sees it.

I see shaving both in my publisher account AND my affiliate account, so it's not only limited to affiliate accounts.

With the same levels of traffic and same highly targeted traffic in end end of October both of my accounts somehow got on Clickbank's radar to shave me. I don't know why. I've never been a big earner at all. Maybe that's their strategy? "Hey, the guy's not making much money anyway, so let's just shave him and he'll think it's his fault, not ours."

I went from selling about 1 out of 150-200 hops to something ridiculous like 1 out of 2000 hops. Then sales completely disappeared for weeks at a time. I sent them an email about it and within a few hours of them receiving the email I "magically" had a couple of sale appear at both my publisher and my affiliate account. Then sales dropped back to zero.

I've also had people email me to say they couldn't purchase through my Clickbank links. They tried with three or four credit cards/debit cards etc and couldn't pay. So there also appears to be problems with their fraud detection software.

But shaving is also happening.

At this point they are actually posting on their site a couple of times a week that they are experiencing some downtime, but that "hops and sales are being tracked normally." Yeah, right. So why do all my accounts go down to zero hops during that time even though I just sent out a special promotion to a list of 2000 people and people should be clicking through?

For most of my affiliate promotions now I've switched over to comparable products on Paydot.com, E-junkie, or I've found merchants who pay affiliates instantly via paypal through Rapid Actions Profits.

Sales immediately went through the roof after I did this.

Gogetta - what you said here was interesting:

"I was told they are doing the shaving based on letters of the first and last names, and also by the country of the customer."

Any details on these variables? This is very interesting if this is true.

Dan

Hi dangregory I'll tell you exactly what happened this weekend since I am still promoting some CB products. On one of my accounts on Saturday I had 6 sales from country code GB and from no where else in the world did I have another sale. Sales came in only in the morning, started at around 6am to 11am and no more the rest of the day. I had 2 sales an hour a couple of times, and then it just dried up with no other sales the rest of the day.

This was really strange because I started looking back through my old sales and I only had a few from GB ever. The majority of my sales would be made in the morning and evenings and most were from the US.

Seeing this was the real reason I came back to this thread. I also sent them an email stating that the weird pattern in my sales has returned. I sent this on Saturday so I haven't heard back from them yet. But check the patterns of your sales, you should be able to easily Identify a few of them.

Oh and by Sunday I had all US sales and not one from GB. Yeah there stealing money from us and I assure you it's a lot.

Thanks for more details - I'll start looking at the country codes of my customers. I hadn't really done that before. I noticed at some webmaster forums people are noticing strange patterns in the type of payments, too. Like they never get people paying using Paypal and then suddenly they get five sales from people using Paypal. So I wonder if another variable in their shaving system has to do with payment types.

Dan

maybe someone is hacking clickbank?

I had the exact same problem early Monday morning. I had been getting *no* sales for days, but then around 3AM (ClickBank time), I had two purchases within 30 minutes of each other from GB, and now nothing more since then. I find it quite odd as well. I'm sure that may be a prime time for shopping in GB due to the time difference, but I still find it odd that I go from no sales for days, to two sales in 30 minutes, to no sales since.

gogetta said:

Hi dangregory I'll tell you exactly what happened this weekend since I am still promoting some CB products. On one of my accounts on Saturday I had 6 sales from country code GB and from no where else in the world did I have another sale. Sales came in only in the morning, started at around 6am to 11am and no more the rest of the day. I had 2 sales an hour a couple of times, and then it just dried up with no other sales the rest of the day.

This was really strange because I started looking back through my old sales and I only had a few from GB ever. The majority of my sales would be made in the morning and evenings and most were from the US.

Seeing this was the real reason I came back to this thread. I also sent them an email stating that the weird pattern in my sales has returned. I sent this on Saturday so I haven't heard back from them yet. But check the patterns of your sales, you should be able to easily Identify a few of them.

Oh and by Sunday I had all US sales and not one from GB. Yeah there stealing money from us and I assure you it's a lot.

Click to expand...

Try This:
1. obtain a national dial-up service. I use 1access.net
2. Add the Firebug & live http header plugins to FireFox
3. Clear All Cookies & Flash Cookies.
4. Connect via a dialup pop in a different city/state.
5. Verify your IP address (ipchicken.com for example)
6. Browse to Google & search one of your key words. Click the link.
7. Note if you are redirected to a different url
8. upon reaching your landing page, are all of the cookies being dropped yours?
9. If you are stuffing, is it through your script or a hosted script else where? Is there a possibility that the script has been changed to rotate in someone else's cookie?
10. Click through to the landing page. Check the cookies again. Make the purchase.
11. Verify that you received credit for the purchase.
12. Repeat the process from a new IP- City / State combination.

I really like the Camtasia Idea expressed in a earlier post.

Thank you all who wrote on here and helped me out, in the last 30 days I have had about 800 hops and 1 sale for $9... I''m going somewhere else, I have already been looking into paydotcom, and now I will also look into E-junkie, Plimus and Rapid Actions Profits. Thanks everyone for this info, I'm so angry right now that I could be getting ripped off I need a change. I think once the word gets out clickbank is either going to have to change their ways or find themselves out of the race.

Thank God I didn't get into it too deep yet


Okay I checked the sites out and really didn't like any of them but paydotcom, so I think that's where I am going to start with.