Complaint Review: CJ.com AKA Commission Junction Affiliate Network

In my own experiences, I used CJ.com for 7 years and made some good money. More recently, I received an email stating that my account would be closed because I didn't follow the rules. And within minutes my CJ account was locked and couldn't be accessed. Furthermore, they requested that I answer their emails but they also locked the email address so I
was not able to answer. And all my answers were sent back to me.

After further investigations on my part and out point since the last years on my sales I found the following:
During the period of Sept, Oct and Nov 2009, I was making good sales with one of my merchant like $60 - $120 a day. Then certainly toward the end of Nov 2009 the sales stopped to $0 while my clicks and impressions were still going up. I contacted CJ support and told them about this situation and they responded that they could agree more with the crash and that they will investigate. They did and found nothing wrong with their systems. But what could I do to verify their statements? Nothing!

Another CJ merchant, I use to make good money back in 2006 certainty stopped making sales for about 1 year and half. Despite the clicks stats still going up but no sales. Then this CJ Merchant decided to leave CJ.com last year and went to another affiliate Network. I signed up with this new affiliate Network and joined this merchant. Believe or not my sales went up the roof and still are going up to this day.

One other similar example from another sport merchant that decided to leave CJ. But prior leaving, since I was a good affiliate for them sent me a private email stating that they couldn't work with CJ anymore and they wanted me to join them on their private Affiliate Network, which I did. Using this new Merchant Network as opposed to CJ, I double my sales on a monthly basis.

To make a story short as per the above, one can see that CJ system either at the corporate level or individual affiliate
manager are dishonest. This is simple and very straight forward facts.

So the question remind since the last 7 years using 100's of CJ merchants how much money never came in my pocket? No idea...

But for sure, I know for a fact that somewhere along the line that some affiliate managers are keeping the sales from affiliate to themselves and perhaps the heads of CJ.com most probably don't even know about it.

Personally, I do not blame CJ as a company. I mean, there are no doubt in my mind that few bad apple are working in their system ripping off affiliates that work hard to get some extra money. And I will believe that the corporate at CJ don't even know about.

Anyway, I still waiting for my last payment from them which I earned but I not sure if I will ever get it...

ps:
CJ if you read this, you should investigate your own back yard as per the above facts you are being betrayed and many affiliates are too.

pps:
I know that there are many instances and examples like this. Affiliate if you have similar situations happening to YOU gather the facts and speak out LOAD. You can make a difference...

ppps: I’m still surprised that so many people “wonder why” Commission Junction pulls such *** moves (and by the way, these are exactly the kind of sketchy, predatory “inactivity fee” practices that recent federal legislation has BANNED and/or cracked down on hard, by credit card or gift card issuers).

Here’s the deal: Commission Junction COUNTS on the fact that the majority of its ads will be published by small publishers who will, individually, NEVER be able to collect a dime of their affiliate payments. This creates, collectively, a HUGE and steady income stream for Commission Junction, and helps CJ offer better deals to their large customers–both advertisers and publishers.

I have heard some shortsighted defense of Commission Junction by people who actually think the failure to pay out to small affiliates is justified by the cost Commission Junction incurs to its bandwidth by hosting the images used in these ads, and tracking the clicks. “Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa…” Yes, that’s the sound of Commission Junction laughing all the way to the bank with millions of cumulative dollars from small affiliates.

Commission Junction is very pleased for its massive-income-generating small publishers to continue to publish CJ ads, banners, and links long after their accounts have been made dormant, and then deactivated. Are you kidding? After they take every penny under $100 that a paid-by-paper-check affiliate has in his/her account, Commission Junction still gets months and months of free advertising out of these small affiliates who often don’t even realize that they’ve been
deactivated!

What can you do? Well, you can stop using Commission Junction. And if the advertisers you like are not total industry giants, you can lobby them to switch to Google Affiliate or any better program. You might be surprised, but this works. In fact, a lot of mid-sized advertisers are actually pretty angry to discover that the money they paid to Commission Junction to pay affiliates never even got to the affiliates, but went right into Commission Junction’s deep, dishonest pockets. I mean, how would you feel if you were an advertiser and you gave Commission Junction a million dollars that supposedly got passed on to affiliates as their commission on your sales, plus you paid CJ some percentage for administering the whole process, and then you found out that $850,000 of that million never went to any affiliate because Commission Junction took it out of the affiliates’ account, and instead of returning it to you as “unpayable commissions,” they just kept it for themselves!