Jaime Lewis’ “Magnum Commissions” Review

June 9, 2013

I recently got an email from Gary Ambrose (an internet marketer who’s one of the better guys) promoting a product that turned out to be from another marketer called Jamie Lewis. The product was called Magnum Commissions.

The Sales Process Begins

The affiliate link took me to a video that introduced me to Magnum Commissions and how it was so easy to get commissions by promoting products on the internet. I decided to bite to see where this would take me. Two alarm bells rang though – the first was that the product was just $47, too low for the hard sell in the video so I fully expected an upsell to appear after ordering. The second was the low $47 price – yeah, it rang two alarm bells – and I expected that the product was for sale on ClickSure.

If you’ve never heard of ClickSure, it’s the place where all the crappy stuff that even Clickbank won’t accept goes. The signature of a ClickSure product is the endless upsells and downsells thrown at you after you order the gateway product. I once went through 14 upsells there before getting to the actual member’s page!

Anyway, Magnum Commissions is not for sale on ClickSure but on Digital River. I’ve always thought of this company as being somewhat selective about what they offer, so it was a plus for Magnum Commissions that it was for sale there.

A little Googling of “Jaime Lewis” showed that he seems to be held in pretty high regard by those who’ve signed up to his previous courses and products. So another plus.

The product included getting a professional quality website built for you that would be a cash machine. You wouldn’t have to spend any money on stuff like PPC (Pay Per Click ads like Adwords) to drive traffic and you’d also get access to 8 upcoming webinars with Jaime.

Upsell Hell

Having ordered the $47 product, I was taken to the expected upsell. This was to get additional websites built plus some exclusive software to drive traffic to the websites. Price: $197.

At this point I expected to be taken to the member site. But no, I was presented with another upsell. This time an all-access pass to Jaime – you’d get access to all future webinars and be able to contact him directly. Price: $297.

Jaime Lewis in one of the sales videos

After buying that, I made the mistake of thinking I’d then be taken to the member’s site. No, yet another upsell appeared. This time it was for 250 PPC campaigns that he used to drive traffic to his own sites.

Queue the sound of a needle scratching across a record.

I’d been told there was nothing to do with PPC in the first video. So another alarm bell goes off. These campaigns were so valuable, I was told, that one of Jaime’s associates wanted to pay him $75,000 just so he wouldn’t sell them to anyone else. However, I stumped up another $167 for them (they were $30 cheaper than mentioned in the video). Maybe they weren’t that valuable after all.

Finally, I got access to the member site after paying $708 when I expected to pay on $47 at the outset.

Newbies Beware

Newbies should take note of this as upsells are a common ploy used by marketers to separate you from more of your money. I hate them which is why I don’t use them on any of my own products.

I spent a bit of time poking around on the member site. First thing I noticed is that the “free professionally built website” isn’t free (the $47 initial product fee aside). You have to register your domain and host it at the requisite hosting company, and can’t use host it on any existing hosting plan you may have. The domain name purchase I can understand but I’ve hosting plans up the wazoo and don’t need to spend any more on them so being told the only way to get the website is to open another hosting plan just plain rankles.

Then I noticed that there was no download link or tab for the traffic driving software I’d bought. No link appeared in any of the emails I received from Magnum Commissions either.

There aren’t any training videos either, just some too-small images that show the various processes you need to familiarize yourself with (e.g how to research a keyword & build a website and maybe flip it, how to do forum marketing, etc) – all basic stuff.

There’s a welcome video where you learn that the system is about creating and marketing your own products and using your own affiliates to drive traffic to your sites – something that was not mentioned in any of the sales videos, so the system is mis-represented.

The webinars are all held at 9PM EDT (1AM my local time) so they’re on way too late for me. Jaime doesn’t stagger the webinars to cater for people outside of the USA, a bit mean given the money many people will have spent on one or more of the upsells.

There was no mention of webinars being available for later playback either and no previous webinars were listed. So the webinars look to be pretty useless to anyone in Europe, unless you plan on staying up till 3 or 4AM in the morning.

As regards the ad campaigns that I bought, for the PPC campaigns that I was told need to be used with this system, many of them were missing (no links) or they didn’t contain any keywords or actual ad texts. They weren’t even worth $167! When campaigns like this are being sold, it’s a good sign that they’re no longer bringing in the money.

Enough Is Enough

At this point I decided I wanted a refund for a practically non-existent product. So I filled out a support ticket and fired it off only to be told all fields on the screen needed to be filled in. What? All fields were filled in. I tried this several times with different settings. All failed. So there isn’t even a working support system on the site.

I emailed the alternative support email address in the hopes of getting a response, especially after I mentioned in the email that their ticket system was broken. Two days later (when this post was written), I hadn’t even got an acknowledgment that my email had been received.

I had to resort to contacting Digital River directly to get the refund process under way. They didn’t respond in any fashion to the refund requests submitted through their own customer ticket system. I had to send secondary “Where is my refund” requests to prompt action. Once they got these, the refunds were processed within a few minutes.

Conclusion

Overall, Magnum Commissions looks to be re-hashed information presented in a very sub-standard way. For someone who claims to have made millions online, you’d think Jaime Lewis would put some money into producing a more professional looking website, one that doesn’t contain spelling and grammatical mistakes, one that provides links to all the products ordered and one that has a working support ticket system.

Support is non-existent (including via email), deplorable given the potential amount of money a customer could spend on the upsells.

You’ll find that there are no affiliate links in this post for Magnum Commissions.

Avoid at all costs.