CJ changed performance bonus rules?

Anyone else notice this?

[MikeNoLastName]

As a publisher we have been linking through CJ to sell a particular advertiser's item for over a year. The advertiser offers a "25% commission performance bonus" for each item if you sell over 50 of their items per month. Last year it worked fine and once you hit 50 items (say 51) you got paid the bonus commission on all 51 items. There has been no change in this advertiser's link listing. This year I noticed no bonus even though we sold over 50. We wrote to CJ. They responded that the bonus is based on "SALES" which they claim can consist of 1 or more items. I KNOW this is not how it was in the past. In fact the advertisers own bonus description specifically says it starts after the 50th ITEM. This means if every person buys 2 of the item in a single transaction you won't receive a bonus until 50 buyers have bought 100 items.

I wrote to the advertiser and they weren't any more helpful in that they simply quoted what it says on their listing, which in itself contradicted itself. They seem to internally define 1 sale = 1 item, but CJ doesn't seem to agree.

Furthermore CJ is claiming that the 25% bonus now only applies to the 51st, 52nd, etc. items only. The advertiser did not comment on this in their response. Their listing is somewhat ambiguous, it says simply

"Performance Incentive For Number of Actions equal to or greater than 50 increase commission to... per action"
It does not say per action OVER 50.
I know, and can prove from past performance reports and payment that that is absolutely not how it used to be.

I guess it is entirely up to CJ and the advertiser to pay whatever they can get away with and change it whenever they wish (and lose publisher partners in the process) but this almost reaches to the point of false advertising, intentional or not.

Has anyone else noticed this unannounced, hidden change (or is it a bug fix?) in the algorithm by CJ? I know it is costing us considerable commissions.
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Ah-ha! I just noticed (obviously as a result of my e-mails), that the advertiser just today CHANGED their description without notice or announcement, to say that an "ACTION" is NOW defined as an "online purchase" (which CAN now mean more than one item) rather than "purchase of AN ITEM" as it previously did, but that still does not cover the bonus being paid on only 1 vs all 51 as it was previously.

[skibum]

It sounds like it dailog with the merchant and CJ doesn't achieve the desired results, then the only other option is to find a similar program that offers better earning potential with the available traffic.

I've never had any issues like that but have seen a change in payout structure and/or program terms with very little notice that resulted in them losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales per month. I'm sure it was painful for both of us but affiliates need to be prepared for that and merchants need to think through cutting a payout by a few percentage points since it may make a large volume of sales unprofitable for the affilaite instead of just saving the merchant a few percentage points on the same volume of sales.