Shareasale Review – Trusted or Absofuckinlutely NOT 🤔💔

Shareasale Review – Trusted Transparent Company or NOT?! Think Carefully

ShareASale is a third party affiliate marketing network bridging between the merchants and publishers. ShareASale services two customer sets in affiliate marketing: the affiliate, and the merchant. Affiliates use ShareASale to find products to promote, and earn commission for referrals on those products. In this Shareasale review I’ll give you my personal experiences from both the merchant and affiliate perspectives and how they screwed over both parties with my example.

I’ve been a publisher at Shareasale program since 2006. Short story is like many good things, if it works all good, but once something is off, Shareasale can be your biggest nightmare. Your business may be affected by it like my merchant accounts are experiencing right now, and as a publisher all your hard work is gone.. and with all no explanation.

Let’s start with me. I’m Nesli, I’m an affiliate marketer. I create rich contents to promote the products I love and personally use. I spend hours on writing, recording videos, taking quality photos. This is what merchants would appreciate to show the real stuff. Well I’ve been working with Shareasale since 2006 making more than 5millions on sales, can’t share accurate info, because once without any notice and reason, Shareasale bans you, you loose ALL the data and the payments, and links.

What’s so bad with Shareasale company and Why be careful with Shareasale?

As I just mentioned, if there is any issue, you’ll face with a wall. They will not answer your emails, and they will block your phone number so when you call their number, you’ll reach to no one. They act like a dictatorship way, nothing transparent with that they do, they force you to be out.

How do you get money from ShareASale?

Issues with ShareaSale

This is a few years back. I contacted them due to a problem with a payment from a merchant account. I told them “hey my second account has some issues, can you look into it?”. They deleted and terminated my account with the funds in it. I thought it was the merchant who created issues or something. I had no idea. I was so pissed off. But welcome to how Shareasale deals with disputes and clients.

I kept asking Shareasale, they just ignored me in anyway about the topic, and thankfully I had my other account to communicate otherwise good luck! Only thing they kept saying “due to the terms and conditions”.

I looked into terms and conditions, and I saw “you can’t open multiple accounts, have to be only one”. I didn’t know of course. So what the fuck is so wrong about answering a customer who’s using your platform for 4-5 years at that point, to say “you can’t have a second account for your second blog”???

Shareasale is awful when it comes to answering any question. They ignore you. They act like Google. When you have a Google ads issues or etc, they terminate accounts so quickly, and good luck, because now you’re facing a wall, a corporate wall, you’ll not get in touch with a human who’s going to answer anything for you. Since you’re bad, you’re terminated.

Shareasale sends hand signed Christmas cards, and that makes you think they care about their community and clients for both the merchants and the publishers. Look, the future is the influencer market, and Shareasale offers a great platform indeed, very user friendly, I loved their interface.

In this Shareasale review, I’d like to point out a danger of trusting them may cost your company money and waste of investment of time and resources. And if you’re a blogger or publisher, it’s sad. When they delete or inactivate your account, they freeze and return all the funds back to the merchants, (or keep them?) and you’ll lose access to your data, all the sales, graphics are gone. Fuckers!

My second incident happen after. Twice. They marked my very innocent white hat account “limited”. Again, they didn’t answer any fucking damn thing. I asked my merchants, they contact the Shareasale and guess what? Both time, they lifted the “limited” status. They apologized and acted like it’s all good, still no response why this happens like that.

And the last thing happened with Shareasale, they terminated my account. NO CLUE as to why. I only wonder if it’s because I moved from New York to Miami, and I didn’t change my address in their system. Is that why? They of course didn’t answer my messages, other than “terms and conditions”. When I call, lol, I am answered by auto robots, my friend said “they marked your number as don’t answer section. I didn’t know they can do this. But when that happens you lose contact to any human possible. You’re out, and you don’t know why.

You’ve been working honestly, hard working for years. And they mark you out.

I asked a merchant partner to email and ask, since they don’t answer me, they immediately responded to him, and said “let her contact us directly” and I did.. Unfortunately for them, a lot of other merchants are already moved to a different place, otherwise I’d make pressure on them with my partners. But they are gone too.

Listen, I had contacts on Linkedin, 3 Shareasale employee on Linkedin for a few years. I messaged all three of them. I said this:

Hi “Name”, I am a publisher at Shareasale since 2016, and unfortunately my account is on hold, I have no idea why, and sadly no-one is responding to me. Can you help in any way? My ID is: 1229027 Thank you so much for your time and understanding, Nesli

Two of them never responded, and one person blocked me. Who does that? These are real employees with names, and who was signing Christmas cards to me, and now block a Linkedin contact who’s asking a question if they can help. What’s up? This is a sad way of dealing with people you work with. If you don’t like the type of people you work with and care of, you’re in the wrong fucking business.

Okay, so why don’t trust ShareaSale?

So now imagine you’re a merchant, you want to increase your sales through influencers. People who’ll review your product or service. You pay an upfront fee and then monthly fee to Shareasale to find and partner with bloggers and publishers. You send free products in exchange of an honest review. You hope that these reviews will convert to sales. Then one day.. your honest publisher (there may be shady ones who’s actually stealing clicks or sales from merchants, etc) who created videos and reviews for you, is terminated by Shareasale. All of your links will look like this:

It’s bad for your business that the links coming out from the blog to your website turn out to be inactive ones. And now you’ve already setup with Shareasale switching to an Impact or another platform is going to take time and energy on your side.

So I recommend you to do your study, work with a company who treats their partners like they pretend to do – sending personalized Christmas cards. With transparency and dignity.

ShareaSale Alternatives – Shareasale Vs.

As I mentioned a lot of my merchants already moved to Impact. I think the reason is a financial one, and I wonder if Shareasale got cocky with their attitudes and growing too fast, and increased their prices too much that is not great for the small online businesses. I asked Impact for the reason.. and also I applied for their affiliate program to grab their link, so I can post here, so you can click and investigate if they are a better match for you. And if you decide to work with them, I’ll make a 3% commission 🙂 yay, it’s a win-win! And that’s why I like this business model.

Thank you for reading my review of Shareasale. I wish they were a bit nicer, people and businesses can make mistakes, at least share what went wrong. Even Google, the corporate big one, has people still answering what was possibly wrong with the account and what to do next. Who do you think you are to ruin people’s businesses and lives just like that? Pitty pitty you! Stay away from Shareasale for the reasons I disclosed. Good luck – keep on going – if you’re reading this you’re on a good path for your business and future sales.