Started in 1998, ClickBank is one of the most established payment gateway for marketers who wants to accept payments online.
I’ve been using them since 2004 and I love it … due to the various advantages they offered. Sure, they do have flaws too but to me those are minor.
This morning when I logged into my ClickBank account, I was happily surprised to see that ClickBank nows allow Recurring Billing! You can get more details at:
Info on ClickBank Recurring Billing
ClickBank Recurring Billing FAQ
This is just Phase 1 of their changes which I first mention in my first post on ClickBank changes in Jan 07. Do expect a lot more goodies to come. 
How Does This Impact You?
Let me quickly summarize for 2 main groups:
1. As a Publisher
If you are running a membership site, you can now use ClickBank in addition to Paypal! I don’t know about you but my BIGGEST headache with using Paypal is I need to handle the affiliate payment myself.
Not only is this time-consuming but I risk losing my affiliates if I ‘forgot’ to send out the affiliate payment at the end of each month. *sigh* (more details on my pain later)
With this new feature, you can now let Clickbank handle the billing to customer and the payment to the affiliates.
In addition, ClickBank will give you timely notifications of sales, credit card updates, cancellations, and other relevant events. Last, but certainly not least, you’ll have your recurring billing product added to the ClickBank Marketplace allowing you to leverage the power of the ClickBank affiliate network to drive product sales!
HOWEVER, do note the following important points (you can get more details at their FAQ site):
- You can only set 1 commission level (yap, this is the part that I hated. I can’t give my JV partners more comission.)
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- ClickBank takes a bigger cut in the profits from second months onwards (9.9% vs 7.5%). But if you consider the service that they provide, this becomes just a business cost.
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- Rebilling is up to 99 months in total only. This is no big issue if you don’t forsee a member staying for more than 8 years and 3 months.
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- You CANNOT change the price of the recurring product once it is approved. You will have to create a new product item to overcome this. If you are doing a pre-launch special with lower price, you will need to create two product items in your account. This is no major problem as Clickbank nows allow you to set up to 500 items in your account (it was increased from 50 to 100 to 500).
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- If a customer cancel their subscription, you will recieve an email from ClickBank. You’ll then need to remove this member from you membership site manually. Billing will be stopped automatically though.
2. As an Affiliate
I love this! There are 2 main advantages that I can think off the top of my head:
- I can rest assure that my affiliate payment for membership sites are handled by a trusted third party.
Too many times have I lost affiliate revenue just because the site owners have ‘forgotten’ to send the payment via paypal.
In my most recent case which I shared with Michael Senoff when he interviewed me a few months ago, there was this marketer who stopped his payments after getting a lot of sales from me (and still gets them for 3 full months after he stopped payment … yes, I trusted him too much).
This was one of the main reason why now I seldom promote membership site unless I know the marketer is a trusted person who can deliver over and over again to my list.
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- I can now benefit from the recurring commission (range from 1% to 75%) and that will remain the same throughout the life of the subscription.
I can even track each of this site performance from ClickBank Marketplace directly and can now easily select which to promote by looking at their refund % (it beats guessing previously).
Well, there you have it. Hope this quick summary helps you to understand the new changes! I will be most happy to hear your comments / experience on this new feature from Clickbank. Do post them as comments to this post. Thanks!
To Your Success,
Keith Choy
The Regular Internet Guy
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Tag: clickbank, internet marketing, recurring billing, membership site
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