I totally disagree with you David. What the heck are you whining about ? Would you like some cheese with that WHINE lol… Come on man that happens all the time and I don't mind if some affiliates did that if they are gonna send 10-20 or more sales to me. That is extra profits that I would not have made if they had not promoted the product. So stop whining dude. Because You agreed to pay 50% commission anyway if the product was sold by an affiliate. So what difference does it make if that affiliate bought using his/her own link ? You still get the 50% so YOU DIDN”T LOSE DUDE. You got paid what you agreed to get paid if it was sold to another person who was not affiliate. You would still have to pay the affiliate the 50% commission if he/she sold it to some one else. Stop being a Whining Douchebag yourself. That is not an attitude of a super affiliate. Sounds like a 16 yrs old crying for getting paid $10 for shoveling the snow( what he agreed to get paid) and not getting the tip which could have been possibly double the amount of what he agreed to get paid. Go act like a super affiliate and stop calling those affiliates “douchebags” who help you make money by selling your product or else it only makes you look like a “Whining Douchebag”.

Yes it is a different thing that if some one is doing just to save money on a product but remember they will not get paid if they sold to atleast 5 different people with 5 different credit cards.

Actually your point goes to moot. When anything goes online, it becomes 100 times more valuable than its offline equivalent? Come on!

Let's take valuable “information” as an example.

I have this great insider tip of Warren Buffet's trading secrets that I would like to capitalize on. I go to a publisher, got them intrigued, and they publish my book and have it sold at all major bookstores for $23.99. That appears fair enough for most accomplished authors of traditional books all over the world.

BUT, if I convert my Word document into PDF and paddle it as an e-Book, then abracadabra! With the magic “e” attached to my product, it becomes 100 times more valuable than in its printed form. My book, or “course” is now sold online for $69.95!

BUT I want to sell more even though I do not have access to the distributing network offered by traditional publishing houses. So, I hook up with Clickbank to sell my product.

And as Clickbank recommends, I should try to UP my COMMISSION so that more people will be interested in promoting my product. $69.95 suddenly seems not enough! Therefore, I up my asking price to $199.95, and pass on $130 as commission to my affiliates. Now, that is a sure-fire way to sell more courses!

Come to think about it, most online e-products are superbly inflated in value. A book which can be sold at $23.99 gets inflated 3 times for its intangible digital edition? Then to sell more, I further inflate it so that I can offer a hefty commission to my affiliates?

This doesn't sound right. Are we ripping our customers off? As a consumer, I would rather just pay what the author think his products' are worth, rather than pay some extra $130 for a heads up. In the end, the customer is paying an inflated price for the very same product.

This is also the reason why e-books are not taking off as much as anticipated. Only exception is Amazon's Kindle. But that again, is books sold at traditional publishers' rates and not “e-books” which may be many times over the sense of logic.

Heck, this post seems too old but I would still add my two cents here…

I didn't bother to go through all the comments so pardon if already stated.

Clickbank does a good job scraping out these douchebags… An affiliate must have had at least 5 sales with 5 different credit cards and two different payment methods before being able to request a cheque. So the only people left to be able to actually benifit from signing up through own affiliate link would be active clickbank affiliates only.

Unfortunately however, there may be instances that the interested consumer doesn't know about this clickbank policy and signs up anyways just to find that they didin't save anything at all. In this manner, clickbank comes out to be the winner because they don't have to pay anything to the affiliate, they can just keep charging $1 fees for every no-sale-pay-period until the “douchebag's” balance goes zero.

Hope it makes more sense.

Lokesh Sharma
TechnoLogic.in

Come to think of it, I got myself confused. What I was wondering is if we can buy products through our own hoplinks? It's common sense not to abuse other affiliates' hoplinks. I've often heard clickbank affiliates say that it's best to buy the product and test it out before writing articles and that makes sense, however at least when getting started out as a new affiliate with little or no money, it's difficult to go that route. Thanks for this article, David.

ok so how do you know when someone does this to you? Don’t you get paid the same whether it was an affiliate or a referral that made the purchase?

exactly! anyone with common sense would instantly recognize that the intent of his article is to promote his product.

I love people who buy through their hop link because they never refund. And it’s way better than all the people downloading your product for free on torrent sites.