Quote Originally Posted by Chris Douthit
It seems like I have been reading a lot about this kind of thing lately. Why do vendors not pay their affiliates, it doesn’t make any sense? If someone is making sales for you they are clearly going to stop if you don’t pay them.

The money they may have made off the affiliate could and likely would have been much more in the long run than the couple hundred bucks the vendors saves for ripping their affiliate off. Plus the program gets called out for having a scum bag vendor.

I don’t get it.
I'm quite well-known for being a sh*t stirrer about this very topic. Someone has to do it.

I've promoted over 200 affiliates programs via my daily newsletter since 1997...

... Guess how many have paid me on time?

As of today, none.

Technically, one has paid me almost on time for more than 7 years -- like clockwork every single month via PayPal... John Saya of CGIConnection. I say technically because his was off by a few hours when his website hosting provider went dark for almost a week (The Planet). And he was off by about half a day on Super Bowl Sunday (John likes to party hard and I'm sure that had something to do with it).

Full disclosure: I gave John the idea to start his company as a dare... and today I help John market his business, so I'm biased.

Coming in a close second is Yanik Silver.

Yanik missed payment by over a week one time and a few days one other time. Besides that, Yanik has sent payment on time every time for years -- again via PayPal.

A lot of people love ClickBank because they now pay biweekly and weekly. And they offer payment via wire, too. Unfortunately, I've seen way too many people complain of bounced ClickBank checks.

You'd be stunned who doesn't pay their affiliate bills. I've named names before and have been on the receiving end of the "treatment."

Here's the deal. These creeps use technicalities and thresholds to act like insurance companies... doing everything to delay your payment... some even flat out won't pay for a variety of excuses. They know most affiliates throw up a link and forget about it.

I actually created a free system that showed my newsletter subscribers how to use pay per click advertising to pressure these affiliate managers to pay their promised affiliate commissions. One VERY well-known internet marketer owed me $1,695.00 -- and I used my pay per click system to get my payment sent via PayPal in less than 30 hours (along with a threat to never mention his name)...

... But one time I used this pay per click strategy and it backfired. I was owed over $600 and they went on the offense and called me a blackmailer... in fact any time you searched my name (Markus Allen), the first few listings pointed to the same page -- about me blackmailing. Apparently Google removed this about a year ago.

Funny how trying to collect commissions is now deemed as blackmail.

Anyway, I no longer offer the system because it wasn't worth the backlash. I was only trying to help people and I got stung instead.

And you'd think most forums would warn you ahead of time about problem affiliates... nope, these guys use "body guarding" and "sock puppets" and the Delphi Technique to make you sound like a nut job for daring to even ask about payment in a forum. This is evil genius.

My advice is simple. If you don't get paid within 3 days of the promised date, start contacting the affiliate. Be the squeaky wheel. Starting posting in forums (and send them the links). Waiting is the last thing you want to do because these criminals count on most people being patient.

Start of very nice. But don't be patient if you don't get a response. And try every means possible of contact before posting on a board.

One last thing. In order to find out how to collect from these criminals, I reversed engineered a book that was titled something like, "How to be deadbeat and get away with it"... something like that. Anyway, this book literally showed you how to ditch and delay and ultimately never pay your bills. The ideas were beyond clever and devious. And some affiliate managers used the very same schemes published in this book.

Affiliate managers know the vast majority of affiliates will never complain -- so they don't pay them. The only affiliates that get paid are the top 10 or so.

That's what you're seeing with the Arbitrage Conspiracy affiliates. I'll bet my entire life's fortune only the top 10 affiliates got paid so far.

As Mike here says over and over again, not getting paid is not cool.