Is Clickbank thieving?! BE WARNED!

Recently I just started selling a product on Clickbank (as an affiliate), where users can pay $1 for a one week trial of the service, and if they like it - they are rebilled $27 per week afterwards. After a few days, I notice I commissioned my first trial. I waited seven days and noticed I received no commission, but the user is still subscribed to the service - and their rebill date now shows that they will be billed for the following week. But where did my commission go? Another week passed - it shows they were charged $27 again, one week later from the previous rebill. Despite these rebillings, I've received absolutely no commission on my end.

I contacted Clickbank's customer support and they put me in communication with an illiterate.

Me : I sold product ' behelit777 ' on Clickbank. Two recurring payments were made based off my sales referral and I received no sales commission from any of it. Does this mean the vendor is scamming the affiliates from their commissions?

Hello xxx, Thank you for your inquiry. A select number of ClickBank vendors, including this one, are selling products with a $1.00 trial as the initial payment with the balance of the charge following. Because of the low amount of the initial charge, there is no net profit from the sale that the vendor can split. The entire $1.00 is taken as ClickBank's Transaction Fee. You will see commissions for any following rebillings of the subscription, but not for the $1.00 trial.

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Attempt 2
Me -
You misunderstood my ticket. I didn't sell only just a trial. There have been two rebillings and I haven't received any commissions.

Product : behelit777
The receipt: D87HEKGP
Trial sold: 2013-12-03

In the transactions for this subscription, it says there were rebillings on the 10th and the 17th. I didn't receive commissions from either rebilling.

Hello xxx,

Thank you for your reply. For the receipt number, D87HEKGP, the customer has cancelled the subscription. Since the customer will not billed, you will not receive a commission any longer.
Please let me know if I can be of further assistance!

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What the hell is this crap? The customer was clearly billed twice because they had been subscribed for over 3 weeks. So where's my commission?

Sell a different product?

i think he said its his product so he can see who's using it and not canceling

I think you are making some mistake here. Not sure what you did but I also have sold some trials for which I have got the commission. Clickbank definitely doesn't shave. The product owner might, but very unlikely as the payment is handled by clickbank.

Maybe they cancelled after the trial period.
I always do the same, buy trial product for $1 and cancel them one day before the rebilling process.
Be sure that they are still subscribed and if you can prove it send the proofs with email to CB support.

If your sale went through, you would get commission. Request a report status on those sales and see what happened. I would not assume wrongdoing, it's probably some issue with the sale itself. Clickbank has been around for very long, never heard bad stuff about them.

Treeofl1 said:

Sell a different product?

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Obviously I am selling a different product now, but I already sank work and money into a website geared towards selling this specific product. It's a little frustrating to set my sights on something - achieve my goal, but find out that my goal was to be scammed. If possible, I'd like someone to explain to me how I wasn't scammed so I could continue to sell the product - but I can't justify it after seeing that I'm not earning money from rebillings like I'm supposed to.

bartosimpsonio said:

If your sale went through, you would get commission. Request a report status on those sales and see what happened. I would not assume wrongdoing, it's probably some issue with the sale itself. Clickbank has been around for very long, never heard bad stuff about them.

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That's why I'm surprised by this incident. My sales evidently went through - the subscription wasn't cancelled until 3 weeks after the trial period. The rebilling is weekly, so I should have received two commissions by that point. I received none. There really is no exception in this scenario that I see, do you see one? In my OP I made multiple requests for them to look into this incident and you can see they aren't interested in figuring out happened...I'm not about to spam their support ticket system with the same question. If I'm not supposed to assume wrongdoing at this point, what am I supposed to assume?

g0g0l said:

I think you are making some mistake here. Not sure what you did but I also have sold some trials for which I have got the commission. Clickbank definitely doesn't shave. The product owner might, but very unlikely as the payment is handled by clickbank.

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If the product owner is shaving, shouldn't Clickbank be able to see this on their end? Why are they so unwilling to look into it?

Why would they persist hosting a rogue vendor on site? If they're concerned about their reputation, shouldn't they be dealing with vendors who are scamming affiliates and customers? I'm handing them proof of something gone wrong on a silver platter - but they're refusing to acknowledge it. I've earned $12,000+ with Clickbank, I wouldn't be accusing them (or a vendor of theirs) of wrongdoing if there wasn't something clearly fishy going on. At the very least, I'm owed a proper explanation by someone of what happened.

Lawlerskates said:

If the product owner is shaving, shouldn't Clickbank be able to see this on their end? Why are they so unwilling to look into it?

Why would they persist hosting a rogue vendor on site? If they're concerned about their reputation, shouldn't they be dealing with vendors who are scamming affiliates and customers? I'm handing them proof of something gone wrong on a silver platter - but they're refusing to acknowledge it. I've earned $12,000+ with Clickbank, I wouldn't be accusing them (or a vendor of theirs) of wrongdoing if there wasn't something clearly fishy going on. At the very least, I'm owed a proper explanation by someone of what happened.

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Because it'll mean less money for them if they take a product off the market.
You could be the first one to actually report something about that product, and they might not care, so they probably won't look into it yo.

at-least they let you know that customer was charged twice after $1 trial .

if they might be shaving then you will not even know about it.

looks like there is a bug or customer has charged back.

open another ticket and see what happen.
-=-

prab1996 said:

at-least they let you know that customer was charged twice after $1 trial .

if they might be shaving then you will not even know about it.

looks like there is a bug or customer has charged back.

open another ticket and see what happen.
-=-

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They didn't even let me know that the customer was charged twice after the $1 total. I had to figure that out on my own. It simply showed me how long the customer's subscription was active for and the rebill dates, but as the dates approached, it didn't show that I received any commissions. There's no way the customer charged back - the subscription was open for 2 rebillings, I would have at least seen the first rebilling on my transactions list. The only way I know there was a rebilling because it listed each rebill date in my Clickbank log as the rebill date approached. But once the rebill date came, I received no commission and it listed the next rebill date (a week later). I tested the product myself and there's no way to extend the 1-week trial without purchasing the service. I've should've seen a commission in there somewhere, chargeback or not.


I assumed there was a bug from the get go. It wasn't until their 2 very weak replies to my ticket until I figured they're up to foul play - but maybe they are just lazy. I could be gaining them a lot more sales if they just fixed the bug.

Overall Clickbank does some fishy things, lets just say that I've been on both the vendor and seller side of things and things don't always match up as they should