Affiliate Issues with Nisim International
Here is what happened when I tried to become a Nisim International affiliate. While this is a very old post, you should take note of what I had to go thorough with cj.com How backwards their staff was, how they can’t even hire proper programmers or website coders, and how the stress I encountered with them made me NOT want to sign up with this Nisim company.
Yes CJ.com’s site works now, but it’s still somewhat confusing, and it’s now 2017.
Tom Davidson
Nisim International
204 Wilkinson Rd
Brampton, Ontario
L6T 4M4
905-451-7772
800-656-4746
tom@nisim.com
I had signed up for Nisim’s affiliate program after my assistant found them via the net.
I put the links on my blog article, along with another one of their competitor’s.
For the next several months, I was getting sales from their competitor, but nothing from Nisim.
Because this blog isn’t part of my day to day business operations, I was too busy to take note of what was going on, and I just thought that the readers liked the other product’s site better.
After this went on for almost a year where I was getting NO sales from Nisim International (I didn’t even remember they existed), I had my assistant go into the affiliate program’s backend, and see how many clicks I was getting.
Well guess what, not ONLY were there NO clicks, there weren’t even any impressions. See image…
Something was seriously wrong, and I was pissed.
Who knows how many sales I lost.
I wrote to Tom and told him the situation, and Tom always seemed like a nice guy, but when he told me to sign up with Commission Junction, I didn’t want to.
I hate Commission Junction, their site SUCKS big time.
They have been around for years, and every time I go in there, it’s a maze of confusion. I have to log in once, then twice going around in circles, and everything seems terribly designed.
Their UI SUCKS!!!!!!!
The last time I was in there, I couldn’t even click on links. And CJ.com doesn’t care about validated code, because they told me I have to use Internet Explorer when THEY should be the ones catering to their affiliates and publishers, not them telling US what browser to use. I don’t use IE as it’s a security risk.
Even when I used IE I still couldn’t click on links.
I know Commission Junction is one of the leaders in the affiliate directory industry, but I don’t care. That’s ALL the more reason for them to spend some money fixing their site, but I guess greediness is more important than quality of service.
Now I’m on FireFox 3.0, to see if their site will work now. Oh, and I just checked it on IE 7 & same thing.
I’ll repeat again since I’m sooo pissed, Commission Junction SUCKS.
These companies who start an affiliate program clearly don’t know what they are doing when it comes to affiliate programs, and they don’t seem to care about the affiliates and their needs. Nisim International isn’t the only company that doesn’t care, I had another one who pissed me off.
As an affiliate, I want things to be easy for me, not difficult.
Anyway, because I wanted to get this Nisim International issue resolved, I grudgingly signed up for Commission Junction.
Tom said he would see what he could do as far as giving me something for all the lost credit of sales and that made me happy enough to want to stick with them, so I left the old links on my blog until I could get the new Commission Junction links.
Well guess what happened next.
Well of course, MORE problems with Commission Junction.
They supply you with banners and text ads that have 2 links embedded in the code, but nowhere in there could my assitant find me just one affiliate link that I could place underneath my own text.
I didn’t even know what my affiliate ID was for christ sakes, so I told Tom about the problem, all the while getting more frustrated. Then he had the nerve to tell me they have thousands of affiliates, and they have no issues at all with Commission Junction.
I said fine, if you are calling me a liar, then I don’t have to be your affiliate, it’s clear you don’t care about whether I can get signed up or not. In fact, that’s another issue with commission junction, I was never notified when they approved my request for membership with the 2 companies I was signing up for.
I finally got the e-mail notice about a week or two later, so the entire time I had no idea Tom had approved me because I had asked him to e-mail me and he never did.
The only thing that would block the notification e-mail, would be if commission junction was on the grey list or some spam list, so it took that long to filter through.
I don’t generally have this problem with other sites I sign up with, and I sign up with many sites every month. Message boards take a while, but by the next day I almost always get the confirmation e-mail.
So Tom tells me he’s out of town, and he’s passing me on to his partner, Sid Samel – affiliate@nisim.com who looks to be his affiliate manager.
Sid was very nice and sounded like he wanted to help me. He confirmed that many affiliates can’t stand Commission Junction either. Maybe Tom and Sid should speak to each other once in a while and get their story straight and whether CJ is great or NOT!
I told Sid what the problem was, unfortunately Sid didn’t seem to understand what I was saying at first, so it took a few e-mails for me to clarify what I was saying.
He kept telling me there were text links there (not text ad links), I kept saying there aren’t, tell me where exactly and I’ll go get them.
Once he understood what I was saying, I finally said, fine, you call my assistant and walk him through it. It should take what, 5 minutes tops to point Andy in the right direction?
I gave him Andy’s number and told him to call him after 2 pm EDT, and waited.
The next day he calls my assistant Andy, not after 2 pm, but at 1-1:30 pm, so of course Andy didn’t pick up. Sid didn’t leave a number, and we were back to square one.
Sid finally e-mails me the next day, and says he’ll call Andy again tomorrow. I am pissed because it’s been 17 days now since I found out that their links weren’t giving me any credit for sales and it seemed like this was taking forever, and wasting a ton of my precious time.
I just told him I was going to remove their links from my blog, this is too complicated, and I’ve lost too much money.
I never got a response back from him. For me this is proof they didn’t care.
If you are an affiliate, you be the judge of whether you want to sign up with Nisim International OR, Commission Junction.
