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If You Don't Want ClickBank to Hijack Your Website, Traffic, Sales and Customers, Sign This Petition Now and Spread It On Your Social Networks and To Your Contact Base!

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Re: ClickBank's Violations of Affiliates and Vendors

ClickBank:

We have released an official post regarding our group's collective response to your Always on Shopping Portal changes through the Warrior Forum. This is a copy of that message, which, along with supporting comments from our partners, can be read here: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketin...

Our group's name is Affiliates And Vendors United against ClickBank's Always On Shopping Portal, or AAVU against CBAOSP. If you haven't yet heard, ClickBank is forcing a new program on affiliates and vendors that is unfair, unethical and a deep violation of existing business relationships.

Our group is comprised of ClickBank vendors from the professional speaking, coaching, training and consulting industries. In sum, we are authors, content creators, information entrepreneurs, experts and thought leaders, and we have been in close communication over the last week since the announcement of your program.

The AAVU against CBAOSP group covers a significant swath of the personal and professional development markets that are represented by vendors (and the affiliates who promote us) in the ClickBank marketplace. Together we account for millions of dollars in sales that have been put through ClickBank's order processing in the last year alone, and a figure that is exponentially larger than that over the last decade.

We are a large contingent of your vendors and affiliates, and our ranks are growing, especially after this post. We will NOT be ignored.

Together, with the vendors and affiliates participating in this thread (and other such discussions currently happening elsewhere online), you will see that our unified voice is not only sizable and worthy of very serious consideration, but you'll also realize that we have the power to create a disastrous and sustained ripple effect for ClickBank's present reputation - and future viability.

This is not a threat - it is a statement of fact.

We would also ask that Warrior Forum members re-post this message across other forums, online communties and discussion spaces. We are standing as one unified group in opposition to this egregious abuse of trust that ClickBank is attempting to force on the vendors and affiliates that are its very lifeblood.

We represent every vendor and affiliate who has made ClickBank into the profitable company that it is today, and we WILL NOT allow you to blindly, systematically and callously damage our businesses.

What follows is a very simplified, point-form version of our group's unified position on - and reaction to - ClickBank's recent Always on Shopping Portal. These points are only being made for the sake of clarity - a reading of this and other forums provides more than enough information about why these changes are so fundamentally misguided and unsound, and why they pose a catastrophic risk to the success of our businesses. A full breakdown of our position and our grievances, which will be in the form of a comprehensive public report, is forthcoming.

So again, these are only very brief, point form facts surrounding this situation:

1) If we comply with the demands of the CBAOSP, it will have a significantly negative impact on our respective site's branding, and by extension, on our conversion rates

When arriving on our sales pages, our customers will see a URL change from www.merchantwebsite.com to shop.clickbank.net. This will immediately erode our credibility and become a sales leak that cannot be remedied or addressed in any capacity whatsoever.

2) The new URL formatting damages our credibility and looks like a phishing site

Is ClickBank so daft to modern conversion 'best practices' and so obtuse to a competently built sales conversion process as to believe that our traffic and customers will not be driven away by a ridiculous, spam-like URL such as the one you are attempting to force upon us?

This point alone has caused many of us to already decide to leave ClickBank forever, regardless of the outcome of this battle. You have already caused us to question your business sensibilities in a basic, fundamental way.

3) The banner (in ANY iteration) is distracting, confusing and will ruin our site's branding and overall sales funnel

There can be no moderation, reinvention or reiteration of the banner that will not ruin our sales page - both in terms of leaks, distorted branding messages and overall conversion rates. The Warrior Forum thread (link above) has plenty more to say on all three of these points, so there's no need to elaborate.

In fact, there is a laundry list of other very serious grievances that we are not going to enter into at this point, all of which are clearly highly valid and accurate, and which have been deeply explored in this thread.

Actually, the thrust of our group's message is more aimed at what we intend to do in reaction to the Always On Shopping Portal program, so let's proceed in that direction. Again, for the sake of brevity, we will list our intentions in point form.

Note that for those who are in support of our group, the following demands speak for all of us:

1) If CBAOSP is not redressed completely (i.e., abandoned entirely), the AAVU group and all our supporters will take immediate, unified action to migrate away from your company, both as affiliates and as vendors, in every capacity that a general 'mass exodus' might suggest

We will disassociate ourselves from you in a way that causes the least damage to our businesses, and which, cumulatively, will cause massive, enduring damage to the current size and future growth of ClickBank's vendor and affiliate base.

2) The AAVU group will permanently blacklist ClickBank, and will publicly identify it as a company that willfully pursues actions that destroy the business interests of product vendors and affiliates alike

We will inform our networks, customers, partners and other business contacts that ClickBank has been blacklisted by the Internet marketing community at large, as well as officially by the AAVU group, being comprised of professional speakers, trainers, coaches, consultants, authors and various other types of information entrepreneurs, content creators, experts and thought leaders and any and everyone else who supports us and stands with our protest of ClickBank's Always On Shopping Portal program.

We would also like to quote a few other points that have been raised on here, and were rebuffed by your official reply:

i) ClickBank is being dishonest with vendors and affiliates

TRUE. One need look no further than the obfuscating, misleading language used about the iframe 'testing' having come to an end, and also regarding previous emails about the AOSP program having been sent by ClickBank. No such emails were sent - any insistence by ClickBank to the contrary is a bald-faced lie and merely enrages us all the more.

ii) There is no relationship between ClickBank's former CEO abruptly leaving and the new COO (yes, the one who previously worked for Visa) launching the AOSP program

FALSE: We know that this is another lie. An insider source has told us that Tricia Phillips (https://www.linkedin.com/pub/tricia-phillips/5/b88/160) is the architect of this plan. As someone who knew how to 'put the squeeze' on merchants in the credit card world, Ms. Phillips is accustomed to treating those who sustain her company's business model very harshly in order to maximize profits and streamline processes. That same ruthless approach to leveraging corporate power and undercutting the little guy will not be tolerated when it comes to how ClickBank attempts to treat its vendors and affiliates.

So Ms. Phillips, hear this: vendors and affiliates built ClickBank up, and as a unified group, vendors and affiliates will tear ClickBank down if need be, and you will be the one to blame. And it will happen because of your arrogant, narrow-sighted and utterly disrespectful approach to properly supporting the business people who helped ClickBank become what it is today. You should be ashamed of yourself. Ms. Phillips thought she would get away with the same approaches she learned at Visa by strong-arming vendors and affiliates who have trusted ClickBank for years. In one fell swoop, she has destroyed that business relationship and the hard-won goodwill and credibility that ClickBank worked for years in good faith to establish in this industry.

Though Ms. Phillips has worked at Amazon and Visa, she has clearly demonstrated that she's woefully lacking in knowledge when it comes to the Internet marketing industry and this form of e-commerce. Tricia Phillips has been exposed as someone who does not understand the intrinsic correlations at play in this business space, and she is doing untold damage to ClickBank's reputation and long-term viability.

iii) ClickBank is trying to model themselves after Amazon

TRUE. This is another instance of ClickBank failing to acknowledge that the traffic that comes to ClickBank is NOT ClickBank's traffic, unlike that of Amazon. Despite any legalese or technicalities suggesting otherwise, at the end of the day that traffic (and the customers, and the orders, etc.) belong to us - your vendors and affiliates - in the truest and fairest sense. But you have decided to be willfully ignorant of that fact by acting like our customers and our traffic belong to you, yet we can assure you that your greed and venality on this point will NOT be tolerated by us.

If necessary, we will take our traffic and our customers to other providers who do understand the underlying truth of this fact.

Any subtle or overt attempt to re-brand yourselves in an Amazon.com model will not succeed precisely because of your reliance on us, the vendors and affiliates who sustain and further your interests. We simply will not allow it to happen. Any assumption on your part to the contrary is an astonishingly arrogant insult to our intelligence.

iv) The real reason for the AOSP is security concerns

FALSE. We are speaking privately with a ClickBank employee who is communicating directly with one of our group members throughout this crisis. We have learned that MasterCard approached ClickBank demanding an explanation for why so many fraud complaints are being levied against ClickBank.

Rather than crack down on all the terrible, low-quality products that ClickBank offers, they opted to try to scalp their vendors and affiliates by appropriating their traffic in a ploy to increase long-term profits, rather than resolve the root of the problem - the junk products themselves (which ClickBank profits from).

In other words, ClickBank has made the decision to continue profiting from junk products and suffer frequent charge-backs ahead of treating it's vendors and affiliates as the valued partners that they actually are. It's clear that this was a horrible and poorly considered decision, but you have not begun to see what the true scope of the long-term ramifications will be for your reputation and bottom line if you proceed with your program.

v) This is the only option that ClickBank has in order to solve this problem

FALSE. One need only to review the many, many solutions offered in this thread to see multiple other viable option that would work in place of the Always on Shopping Portal.

There are many more 'true and false' points that could be raised here, but we would strongly encourage all of you - our AAVU partners - to fully educate yourselves on each of these points by thoroughly reading the Warrior Forum thread and others in order to more fully grasp the true scale of ClickBank's outrageous offenses against us in trying to institute this program.

In Conclusion:

ClickBank, you have lost our trust in a fundamental way.

Anything short of a complete abandonment of your Always On Shopping Portal program will result in the actions described in this message.

We will not accept a modification to the program, and we will not accept new 'iterations'.

We are collectively prepared to begin a unified migration away from your platform, and a multi-industry blacklisting of your company.

The reach of our influence as vendors and affiliates does not stop with what actions we can take against you for the necessities of our own businesses, but rather we will actively work to inform our contacts, partners and customers across our various industries that ClickBank has been blacklisted as a pariah retailer that will actively do damage to the businesses of those it works with, and does not have the best interests of customers - let alone vendors and affiliates - at heart.

-Affiliates And Vendors United against ClickBank's Always On Shopping Portal group

September 30, 2015

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If You Don't Want ClickBank to Hijack Your Website, Traffic, Sales and Customers, Sign This Petition Now and Spread It On Your Social Networks and To Your Contact Base!