Forum Moderators: skibum
Plain English would be nice, eh?
"Charge-backs may be applied to Your Account at any time, including previous payment cycles."
the email said small policy changes required that they make slight changes to the PSA. Slight? The thing was rewritten top to bottom. There may not have been many actual material changes (a handful of them), but since the entire document was rewritten and reorganized. To find them takes a major exercise in connect the dots.
In addition to the privacy policy and the chargebacks thing, the new agreement gives CJ rights to use your trademarks in marketing material. There is also a good deal of new language to give them more leverage over publishers who use creative promotional methods, which is probably the major reason for the new document.
I should have waited before signing up.
:(
I should have waited before signing up.
You could always just buy something from one of your merchants. :)
There has been lots of concern and speculation by affiliates regarding CJ's new Publisher Service Agreement that just came out. I have not been able to carve out the time to dig into the new PSA at all so can't really comment too much personally. Scott Jangro who used to be with Befree had time to investigate. He published some of the most important changes in an overview at his Jangro blog. Be sure to really take a closer look at his in-depth comparison between the old and new PSA, which he has linked to its own CJ PSA changes page.
There are some significant changes in the new PSA so even if you typically ignore legalese, you should take a look at it. One of the important changes is that all affiliates need to have a privacy policy on their site which incudes this:"You must fully and accurately disclose Your use of third party technology, including CJ's tracking technology, use of cookies and options for discontinuing use of such cookies."Another thing some affiliates are concerned about is that sales can be reversed anytime and not just limited to 60 days after the sale. One thing that jumped out at me also is this: You can be deactivated by CJ if "Your Account has not been logged into and/or there have been no Transactions credited to Your Account for any 30 day period."There is some really important stuff in here that all CJ affiliates should read.
You have 14 days to read then it will be assumed you accept the new terms. So if I were an affiliate that relied on CJ for part of my income, I would read carefully to be sure I understood the new terms and was in compliance with them.
Linda
Does anyone have some standard wording that will satisfy this requirement? Or has anyone asked CJ what it means?
I am wondering if there will be a load of puzzled people reporting having been deactivated on Oct 20th.
You must fully and accurately disclose Your use of third party technology, including CJ's tracking technology, use of cookies and options for discontinuing use of such cookies.
So they want us to educate the user on how to disable cookies and thereby disable tracking?
Sounds like a win-win for the merchants. They'll still have links but be unable to track our commissions.
There's no win for CJ in this, but they must have been forced into it somehow. (new privacy laws?)
Cookie disabling is to affiliate marketing what ad-blocking is to ads.
I think that end users are better off not knowing about cookies. They will naturally acquaint them with spyware, since spyware removers tend to remove them.
Commission Junction should provide us with a script that puts an obscure tiny link in a corner which leads to a popup that will be blocked on most systems which explains to enable cookies for an optimal viewing experience and only explains how they are used down in some license agreement in fine print that you will implicitly agree with by closing the popup.
Cookies are tiny but helpful files that hold information about you that a Web site places on your hard disk. Cookies can make your return visits to web sites easier by remembering things you did on it before such as preferences you selected. it's the cookie that remembers what you selected so that you aren't asked again which can be annoying. Cookies are not required to utilize most web sites, but enabling or allowing cookies to be used will make your online experience more pleasant.
I'm not worried about this, though. I have a privacy policy on the sites I collect email addresses on (just because studies have shown that email signups go up when a visitor sees the words "privacy policy" on the page). I imagine, that this is about the only reason a visitor checks a privacy policy, to see if you sell email addresses or not.
They can't be serious?
[cj.com...]
Just because the PSA doesn't say they won't reverse any commissions after 60 days doesn't mean that they have intentions to ever do that. I'm guessing that there isn't a network agreement out there that has such a restriction on the network.
(g) Negative Accounts. You may have a negative balance if Your Account is debited amounts equivalent to previous Payouts for Charge-backs and You do not have an adequate Account balance to cover the Charge-back amounts. When You have a negative balance, You must immediately remit payment to CJ in an amount sufficient to bring Your Account to a zero balance, or Your Account is subject to 1.5% interest per month, compounded monthly.
So you worked hard, made sales throughout Christmas, then in June, merchant leaves network and reverses everything way back to your Christmas sales. Your balance goes negative, you have to pay the commissions you earned plus 1.5% interest per month compounded monthly.
Is this legal?
Have now dumped cj once and for all.
Have now dumped cj once and for all.
AdNonsense
As far as the chargeback issue, he said that once the commission has been paid to affiliates, it would take something huge to cause them to reverse it because if we don't get paid, they don't get paid and CJ has no plans on becoming a charity ;)
There was one point that I was using CJ heavily and making fairly major money - thousands of dollars a month. That won't happen again, because I've had my account terminated for inactivity (twice) and now I have no way of checking out what merchants/links/products are worth promoting.
It doesn't cost them five cents to keep an affiliate account active. I can't fathom why they are so anxious to put up barriers to doing business with them.
