[Justdoit]

I applied to a costume merchant program on CJ, since I had a few sites I wanted to add halloween costumes too. Now all these sites are halloween sites. I applied to the program and waited, and waited so I sent an email to "said costume merchant" and asked him to please accept my application to their program so i could get busy promoting their products.
The answer was my site did not meet their quality guidelines and since it did not have a PR3 or above it was not good enough for their program.
What a cluless moron!!
I am a 5 bar publisher for CJ for a long time now, and the site that he said is not good enough, makes over a grand year round, from costumes, I just wanted to ramp it up a bit for halloween.. That's ok, I signed up with their competition, and have generated over $580 in commission in the last week..
Clueless affiliate manager can ....... well you know.. :-)

[Chuck Hamrick]

I would send a follow-up email stating that you are making money for XXX and state the amount of sales.

The bigger the brand the bigger the ego and the lazier the affiliate manager.

[AffiliateWarrior]

wow... that is ridiculous, that said, there is opportunity and I'd work through it if I were you. You can feel free to make them feel a little silly for turning you down by pointing out your success with similar merchants and the fact you're giving them a chance to recover from a mistake despite your initial instinct to blow them of. Or you could just be super professional and write them an email asking "are you sure? here's what I've done in the space and I think you were a little hasty in the decision" I'm willing to bet they'll reverse. If not, there may be other issues.

[AffiliateWarrior]

The key is to be good spirited about it... we all make mistakes and speaking as a manager who has made plenty, sometimes, when you are handling a ton of apps, your eyes start to blur a little and mistakes can be made. If someone came back to me and showed me a record of success with similar sites, I'd approve them as long as they weren't using banned marketing methods.

[Justdoit]

I am not really inclined to send them an email either way, when some affiliate manager denies sites because they are not a PR3 and therefore recieve no traffic, they need to learn SEO 101, pr these days is not an indication of traffic to a site..
There were no other issues other than the fact that my site only had pr2 not 3 and he preferred a wordpress site over html. We had a few emails go back and forth and still no approval so I figured to heck with them and am happy with new costume merchant who is converting nicely, as is amazon as always..

[Chuck Hamrick]

I agree that they need to learn the space but aren't going to find it themselves. A well written email from an affiliate may make the difference but at least you will get it off your chest.

[PrintRay]

As an AM I am pretty careful about who I choose to allow in our program. This does lead to making mistakes form time to time. However, one thing I have never understood about AMs, is rating a publisher strictly with site traffic. Obviously it should be one of the criteria, but it can't be the only gauge.

I dont know any website that started out from day one by having huge traffic. Traffic is built over time. Also some seasonal sites (like Halloween costumes) tend to have an ebb and flow when it comes to their traffic and rankings depending on when in the season you are looking at their site. So just because they rank x now, doesn't mean they will rank x in a few months when they do most of their business.

Certainly if a publisher actually reaches out to me, I give that publisher a +1 and go from there. An engaged publisher is gold. Their loss.