I know I'm leaving myself wide-open with a topic like this, but I really can use some 3rd party insight.

Please allow me to explain how I came to be in this position.

Earlier this year, an acquaintance asked me to take a look at her new website and give her some feedback. She had really done a nice job with it. She had incorporated a blog into it, had a couple of banner ads running, had her pic featured on the front page, had opt-in lead capture features built into each page and had a couple of text ads running. She also had placed ads for her top businesses with menu links to them; she had sign-up links built in for a number of traffic exchanges and even had set up a digital products mall. All-in-all, it was very impressive. She obviously had spent a lot of time and energy in building it.

Oddly enough, the very next day, another acquaintance on a totally different social site sent me a link to his new website.

As I was looking it over, it suddenly hit me that it was the same site I had seen the day before, but different. It was all his stuff, not hers, but it was the same site none-the-less. It just had different headers, ads, links, banners, blog, colors and formatting.

I looked at the copyright line at the bottom, went back to her site and saw the same copyright info. Looking at the 2 sites side by side, I noticed a “Get your own site” link which took me to an Affiliate sign-up page. “Join for Free” it said, so I did.

After joining, it took me to a page showing me all the tools available to me a free member, and I’ll be honest, I hadn’t seen a back-office laid out like this before. It had written and video tutorials on customizing the site, how to use the features and quite frankly left nothing to be desired.

The only question I had was, I’m not exactly a newbie, why hadn’t I ever seen this before?

But I was presented with an opportunity to upgrade to a paid position. All the features were still available, plus a number of additional customizing options and pages to use. The paid option gave me URL Rotators, Banner Rotators, Ad trackers and more Auto-responders and follow up messages than I could use.

The paid option was less than $15 and offered a 50% commission on referrals, and no minimums on when you can cash-out. They used both PayPal and AlertPay.

Honestly, I had not seen a program that offered so much, for so little. I upgraded and set up my pages, rotators, trackers, responders, headers, my company logo, site background and messages. When I finished, my site looked entirely different than the 2 sites I had previously seen and quite frankly, I thought it looked like I had spent a ton of money on having a custom site built.

I sent an email to some friends and asked them to take a look. 2 joined as free members and 1 as an upgraded member.

Now, here’s my dilemma:

After a couple of months, I requested a cash-out through PayPal knowing that I would have more commissions due in a couple of days and I wanted to see whether PayPal or AlertPay would be quicker. So when the new commissions posted, I requested a cash-out through AlertPay.

After the recommended time-frame had passed, and no commissions had shown up in either account, I submitted a Support Ticket to the sites Help Desk. No response. In all, I sent 4 Support Tickets, none got an answer.

I started Googling the company, the owner and anything I could find connected. Surprisingly, I could not find one single blog, forum discussion or complaint about this issue. I contacted some of the other site owners through the company forum, and found that they had not been paid their commissions in months! But surprisingly, there was not one single posting in the forum about the fact that no-one was getting paid their commissions.

The consensus was that they saw the value in the site to be greater than the unpaid commissions and therefore weren’t going to raise a stink about it, lest their sites be taken down. According to the back office stats, the top referrer had referred over 500 members and in our communications, he let it be known that he hadn’t been paid since the first of the year. There are now more than 5,000 members.

I called PayPal and AlertPay to see if they were aware of an issue with the site owner’s accounts and found that I was the very first person to bring this to their attention. Both PayPal and AlertPay promised to follow-up, and I was even copied on their communications to the owner. To this date, neither PayPal nor AlertPay has gotten a response.

What do I do now? As I see it, I have a few options:

1. Like the others, I can continue to use the site and not worry about the commissions owed, but be pro-active in letting new members know about the commission issues.
2. Drop the site altogether, but I know I can’t replace the features and tools available to me for anywhere near the price I am paying now.
3. Contract with a site developer and have a site built that would offer everything to its members as this one does. (A good friend who is in the biz says it can’t be done for less than $125,000-$150,000)

What would you advise or do in my place?

I’m seriously looking forward to your comments and suggestions.