Commission Junction (CJ)

After working with other affiliate networks, I have to say that CJ is one of the worst. Their customer service is extremely unhelpful, rude, and slow to respond to urgent issues. They don't give direct contact emails, so affiliate managers are forced to contact the support team email and hope that they will respond in a timely manner. Their reporting capabilities are outdated as well as their platform and the style of their platform and what they can report on. I would not recommend this platform to any brand that is looking to build a successful affiliate campaign.

Well, where do I start.

I've been signed up with Commission Junction for well over 2 years now.

My site is quite small and I've had sales that amounted to just under £9 GBP. After being inactive for a small amount of time, the CJ team decided to remove £7 from my balance.

I queried this and an advisor called Ashley politely offered to have the £7 refunded and the counter for the next fee reset. This was great news I thought. Until two months passed and there was still no sign of the refund. I was simply left with £1.82 in my account.

So, I got back in touch to query this, left it 24 hours, logged back in to find that my account had been deactivated, the remaining £1.82 in my account had been removed from my balance (and marked as a fee) and that my correspondence had been ignored.

The support team have ignored me since, I've taken the event to a host of online review sites and social media and it turns out that this happens often (I counted 53 similar experiences since January 2016).

My advice? Look elsewhere for an affiliate service. Unless you have tens of thousands of your local currency to dedicate to promoting your website, you simply won't make enough sales through this service to avoid the fees. One of the worst experiences I've had.

I tried CJ actively for about 10 months but was locked into a 12 month contract. In those 10 months, CJ reported many conversions totaling over 470 orders and 20k in sales over the 10 month period that I was actively using it. And yet during this same time, I saw no noticeable increase in the actual number of sales we received on our end.

Many of the sales were our regular customers, or otherwise prospective customers who were already on the path to ordering from us but thought they might get a deal from one of the affiliates. This is partly due to the anything-goes practices that many of the affiliates, including the larger ones, use by creating bogus "deals" and non-existent coupons to attract them to their landing page in order to get commission for a sale that was coming our way anyway. Some deals were our own that we provided, but the most enticing ones were usually inaccurate.

To be sure, I started this service on a recommendation by someone supposedly earning millions from using their services, so unless this is a ponzi scheme, which I doubt, I'm imagine this has its place for some advertisers. But what I can say after having thrown away 10 grand at this service with a fair level of confidence is: if you have a niche business, stay far, far away. And no, the nice folks at CJ will not inform you of this.

And the reason is as simple as it is glaring: incompetent affiliates. CJ is filled with all types of affiliates, but in all seriousness, the only ones that will actually bring sales are the deal and coupon sites. And scraping some half-hearted deals and coupons from your site onto their more visible site is about all the effort you will see from them. And anyone with a niche business, I can confirm that your common sense is right on: yes, you really do need a special touch for selling your products and services. Affiliates will absolutely not go the extra mile to try and understand your business and how best to approach selling your unique products, and they certainly do not have a magic recipe for selling products that you yourself could not. They will follow the same cookie-cutter approach that they do for larger industries with standard business models.

I posted many deals and coupon codes on my CJ admin panel, but not once did I notice any of the affiliates taking advantage or bringing sales for the products that were targeted. The affiliates simply showed no interest and had no clue how to sell my unique products.

I have been more than 10 years with CJ. In 2015 they closed my account, because of bad links. I lost all earned money, about 120 euro. After some months I opened again account. I gave them a second chance. In 2016 they removed me again. There are much better networks: Avantlink and Shareasale. Stay away from CJ!

Hi everyone,

I ran a promotion for a month or two promoting London Eye on Commission Junction which I made commissions over £100. I have new been waiting a year since those sales were made for payment and every month they say London Eye have not paid. I am some what confused though as to why this company is still promoting and live on Commission Junction and why it is fine for me to do work promoting a company for them to choose not to pay for over a year. Its not exactly a small company either. Terrible service and will not use this network again after such treatment.

This is a site for web developers and site owners to use affiliate advertising through. They have a good number of name brand companies that use them to advertise. The way the site works is quite simple.

First you setup an account to receive payments from advertisers. Next you find advertisers who are offering a program through this site and you join that program. Then you the links and banners provided by the advertiser through CJ.com and put them on your site.

Some advertisers pay you for leads or click-through to their site. Others give you a commission of sales. This site is very comprehensive an a real industry standard. Plus if you want to use them for advertising then you can get a lot of targeted audiences. Great tool for web developers.