But then I became suspicious when a sales from two existing customer of mine triggered a commission request from an affiliate in the USA. Existing customer won't need to go traversing the internet to locate my website, they been there already and spent time buying products from me. Also odd coming from the USA. My online business is based in Australia and sells 99.9% to Australian customers. Furthermore the affiliates website had no mention or link to my business. I checked with my customers and asked if they had visited that affiliates web-site and they said no.
I then checked all the commission I had paid out up until then (~$100) and sure enough, each and every affiliate was questionable. I did a google site search of each and none had any links or adverts to my web-site. Two affiliate's web-sites were not even working and probably never did.
I emailed Clixgalore and asked them to look into the matter but got NO RESPONSE. I declined the commission and turned off the auto approval of affiliates and also turned off the permission to auto-debit my card to keep the account topped up. Since then I have not had reason to approve any commission because all have been dubious sales from websites with no means of promoting my web-site.
I did some research and found that a technique called "cookie-stuffing" is the method commonly used by internet thieves who then manage to leave an over-riding cookie on your computer when you visit various web-sites across the net. In simplified terms, this cookie remains dormant until you purchase from a website who advertises via Clixgalore (or similar) and then this cookie comes alive and announces itself to the affiliate marketing agent as the affiliate who brought the customer. Of course this is theft but companies like Clixgalore seem to turn a blind eye because they get a share of the commission paid out and based on my experience, most (>90%) of their income is from these cookie stuffing criminals.
Then one day I checked my bank account and saw that Clixgalore had dared to debit my card to top up my Clixgalore account. I got really angry. I had turned off the auto-top up check-box but when I rechecked it now, it was back on again.I then emailed ALL the sales people who were so keen to sign me up and threatened legal action if they did not reverse that charge. I only got one response, from a sales person who agreed to refund me $61 of the $150 they debited. I also pointed out the problems with the scam websites who were stealing commission. He politely ignored the websites which did not work, offering no explanation or course of action and told me that the one which did work was generating commission via another web-site http://www.coolcomputing.com. I checked this web-site and it did mention my web-site but had no actual link to my web-site thereby making it impossible to have generated any traceable sales. (People have to click a specially formatted link to trigger the Clizgalore system, no click = no notification message to Clixgalore)
I replied to Clixgalore that I did not accept this explanation and told them they were aiding criminals, making them criminals themselves. I demanded that they return the commission these thieves had stolen. They have not returned the money and I have not heard from Clixgalore again.
Scam-galore, theft-galore are terms which come to mind, so be warned. These people do not seem to object to cookie stuffing criminals and if you are using Clixgalore, you have probably paid out most of your commission to people who did not rightfully generate any sales leads to your web-site. If there are enough of you then I look forward to some legal firm opening a Class-action suite against Clixgalore to teach them to not depend on criminals as an income source.
Their terms and conditions state that they are not liable for any losses you may incur as a merchant. So scammers are welcome to do their best and you don't have a leg to stand on because Clixgalore get their share of the scammer heist.
Shop around and use someone else.