Commission Junction [CJ]
Reviews and Complaints

It is sad that greed and selfish companies like this get some of the best Brand Name Companies to profit from our hard work placing their ads on our many sites and never show dime of profit for our work. I really don't understand why Adobe, Home Depot, Godaddy and many more top of the line vendors know this is happening and continue to be a part of Commission Junction's rip-off scams. I see I have a lot of work removing their ads from all of my websites and replacing their ads with someone I trust. JT

Sigh.. I was hoping that my complaint with them would result in my rightfully earned commissions being reinstated, but see that it probably won't happen. I had $1, 300 in commissions deleted because KEEN said the email addresses used to set up the accounts were "suspicious".. not that the transactions weren't valid.. but that they THOUGHT there MIGHT be something wrong. Just a warning for those of you out there that are using Commission Junction to market KEEN.com.

Glad that I found this post. Was going to do battle with them but know see it would be a waste of time.

Logged in to CJ today and found that my account had been canceled due to inactivity over the last 6 months, that inactivity being over 100, 000 page impressions but no sales. I had over sixty clicks on a download Real Player ad but sales. How likely is it that over 60 people would click on a banner that plainly said 'Download Real Player for free' but not a one downloaded it?

They also took the $6.55 that I had in my account as a fee. In other words I had to pay them to run their ads!

Actually caught them in the act one time when I wasn't credited with a GoDaddy sale to a friend of mine through a banner ad on one of my sites. Of course CJ and GoDaddy led me on quite a merry-go-round but I did finally get paid. Never did really figure out if it was CJ's or GoDaddy's fault they confused things so well.

Anyone has an updated comment on CJ for 2011?

So I've been with CJ since 2005. I signed up with hundreds of affiliates, and placed their smartzone code on thousands of pages. From [protected] I was providing them with 3, 000, 000 page impressions a year, [protected] a day all from organic search engine traffic. .

At first checks were coming in rather steadily (always a low amount) Back then you only needed $25 to get a check. Then about 2 years ago the checks stopped. I somehow only accumulated $38.70 from 8, 000, 000 page impressions and 8000+ clicks since my last check.

To put how lame CJ is into perspective, from [protected], I have made $50, 000 some odd dollars from their competition that run on the exact same pages. I've made less than $300 from cj.com in those same years.

I let all of this ride because it would be a lot of work to remove all of their code from literally 3000 web pages. I let it ride because it cost me nothing to use... so I thought.

This is where the scam comes in. I logged in yesterday... and I noticed they charged me a fee of $10. I asked a question of their support and they that's because I had not had a sale in 6 months (Hard to believe, 1.3 million impressions in those 6 months) That's funny because in December my wife bought a "Letter from Santa" for the kiddo for Christmas. Where did that sale go? Googling CJ.com scam, I see that I am not alone.

I never even mentioned the sale yet, before I had a chance, they canceled my account (!) and said they were sending me a check for my remaining balance. GEE THANKS!

So I am advising that people avoid CJ.com or to be very wary of their practices. I am only upset with myself for sharing my real estate and having their ads competing with links from www.ad.ai that could have been making me real money.

I joined cj years ago and only got a commission on my own purchases… I spent a lot of time promoting my site.. it was a directory and I had acquired over 500 affiliates that approved my site through cj.com…

DirecTV ripped me off and refused to pay me a commission on my own purchase…

I called cj right away when the commission did not show up in the back office. also, the link I put up was one DirecTV emailed me as some affiliates did on promotions to save you the time of having to log into your cj account and retrieve the link yourself as was the way I usually did…

It took a month before cj had got back to me and said they had contacted DirecTV on my behalf and tried to get DirecTV to pay me the commission due but said DirecTV said it was my responsibility to make sure my links track and that the code is right… the code was right, it did not track, and when I followed up to have cj look into as to why it did not track, they had no answer…

Also, my neighbor went to my site and clicked an affiliate link on my site to Sears and ordered a $200 vacuum cleaner… the commission never show up on that either. I had a family member go to the site and order something and again, no commission showed up or was paid…

I also had my account deactivated by them a couple times … they claim due to inactivity…

When I had been promoting the site, I had over 3500 visits in one month… many return visits to certain advertisers and yet not a single commission…

I then went to check my account info and I was blocked out… I had to call cj and the guy on the other end was typing frantically and then said ” I reset it, you should now be able to log in…” when I did all my tax info and name and address had been re-set and blanked out too…

By the way, they can’t send you a check without that info… which was there initially, then disappeared… it was as if someone say an insider employee with access to your back office was monitoring it and since they log everyone of your log-ins… they would know if you had logged into your account to check your commissions or not and if not, if they were dishonest, could delete them or divert them…

Also, commissions use to post in real time… or at least within an hour... they had changed that to always being posted every 24 hours via a 24 hour delay before they would post commissions… that is, if you made a purchase say yourself and logged in to check it, it would not be posted till 24 hours later…

Now say you did not check your commissions for say 48 hours or two days… if they are checking every day, and know you are not, what is to stop them from deleting those commissions from your back office if they are con artists and know that you had not logged in since last time and thus would not know of the new commissions owed you that came in since them unless say one of them was a purchase you made yourself… and thus would be looking for it to show up next time you logged in?

And what would be their motive to screw you? because the client pays them all the commissions and they in turn pay you…

The only way you would know if you had a commission coming or not would be if you actively logged in a daily basis to check your back office as their was no email notification to otherwise inform you…

I believe they are dishonest and cannot be trusted… the proof is in the pudding… look at all the complaints from others filed …

Just google “commission junction scam” and learn about the two class action suits filed against them that they and all their money were able to get their attorneys to get dropped... they also put up some of their own sites countering the claims with numerous claims of praise about their service... I joined that site with a membership as required to post a comment that they screened and did not post... obiously the ones behind that site that also comes up in a google search of cj.com scam was placed there to try and discredit the reports of others claiming they were scamed as I was...

I know for a fact that I sent them about 500 UNIQUE visitors to one merchant and I only got 2 conversions on a free trial offer. One conversion was a test that did not convert on the first try. I had to contact the merchant and show them proof that I sent them the lead. It took over a month to get the money.

Something is fishy about Commission Junction. I believe if you are not well known or if you do not send them a ton of traffic, you will not be paid. I think that is the nature of affiliate marketing. However, it is hard work to send a ton of unique visitors and not be paid.

Stick to product creation or providing a service. I bet if I advertised to 500 unique people offering a free product, I would get more than 2 responses for my offer

This is so accurate. I have had sales that I am aware of and have documentation for and have not received payment from CJ and sle does not show on report. Their answer is don't worry about the litlle sale taht could not be trackedyou should focus on getting mre vistitors to your site. Stay with Amazon, Yahoo Google they do pay out and tracking is accurate.