If you’re thinking of starting a partnership with Eabsinthe (whatever it might be, affiliate marketing or otherwise) RUN FOR THE HILLS.

I have been an affiliate with since 06/2007 and I’ve sent over 11,000 clicks to their website. The first 4 months I signed up with them everything was fine. I was sending them traffic monthly, they were recording sales monthly. A normal month I would average 2-3 sales per month. The months after that (I was too inexperienced to see it then) they started tampering with my account.

I eventually hit payment threshold of 50 pounds.

I didn’t get paid so I e-mailed them.

This is the eabsinthe affiliate dashboard...You can see the 11,000+ clicks with 0.16% conversion... LOL

No response.
E-mailed again.
No response.

I wrote a review exactly like this one.
Response! They apologized, paid, and even sent a bottle of free absinthe. Neat! I took the review down.

After that I was kind of confused. At the time they seemed like an honest company just with some strange communication problems.

Come to find out in the future, they would shut off my account for a couple months at a time and my sales would not be counted. This continued into 2008, they would turn my account off and I wouldn’t see a single sale for 4 months straight. Then they would turn it on and everything would be back to normal.

Until the month of November 2008 they decided to turn it off and never turned it back on again. I paid no mind of it and was onto different projects at the time.

This is my sales report. You can see how sales were steady in the beginning...and this was when my traffic was a lot lower than it is now.

8 months later I was checking stats for my absinthe site when I came to realize this. I looked at my conversion rate, 1/10 of 1% (0.16% to be exact). Affiliate programs never convert under 1-2%, let alone 1/10 of 1%. It screamed dishonesty – they were blatantly stealing my traffic.

I sent them an e-mail about it around 7/23. The next day my account was turned on and I made 2 sales days apart. Needless to say I was pretty steamed, wondering just how many sales I could have gotten for that near-year my account was shut off.

To date I’ve emailed them about 4 times with no response.