Clickbank is a popular affiliate marketing network that caters to marketers that are selling digital products like software, membership sites, and eBooks. They handle all the accounting, credit card processing and pay outs, allowing anyone to set up shop online easily and quickly. The site also hosts a huge number of products that affiliates can promote to make money.

Over the last few years, Clickbank has been the affiliate network of choice for many Internet marketers. There are two different aspects of the site, one as a vendor and one as an affiliate. I’m going to discuss both sides and how they work to help you understand how the site works. Let’s go into the vendor side first.

Clickbank is basically the middle man between a customer and you. You use them to process orders (they take a small cut for processing) confirm payments, and handle customer service. Because of this process, it is much easier to get involved with them rather than go through the long process of opening a merchant account to take orders online. By setting up a thank you page (download page), listing your price, and creating a sales page, you can get started selling in 10 minutes.

There are some huge benefits of using the network. You can submit your product to their Marketplace which is browsed by consumers and also by affiliates. There are over 100,000 affiliates in Clickbank and many of them are experienced with Internet marketing. So by using the network, you can tap into their huge affiliate army.

The networks has added some great new features such as the ability to track where your sales are coming from, set up a 2-tier commission structure, and also offer recurring billing. Previously, the lack of these features has led users to criticize their service and use other vendor solutions.

There are some flaws to the service as well. While you can sell multiple products, you have to set a solid affiliate commission rate for products. So you have to open multiple accounts and manage them separately which can be time consuming. It has also become common for thieves to share your download pages once they become a paying customer (some even spider your site to find it). To prevent digital theft from happening, you have to buy third party security software.

The network also forces you to offer a 60-day money back guarantee. Any customer can simply contact their customer service department and get a refund within minutes. To curb this, they have kept track of serial refunders and banned them from the network but some people use different credit cards to cheat this system. There are also limited affiliate statistics, limited vendor statistics, and you have to manage affiliates manually without a central system to keep them updated. Clickbank have not really updated their interface up to par as other networks in the industry.

As an affiliate, you can go through their marketplace and find a product you want to promote. All you have to do is plug in your affiliate ID into their Clickbank link. The huge networks allow affiliates to promote all kinds of products in a wide variety of niches. Because many vendors know the importance of marketing, use direct response salesletters, and payouts are high, Clickbank products are amongst the highest converting/most profitable in the affiliate industry. This is what has drawn affiliates to Clickbank.

There are some flaws like other networks. Many people know about Clickbank links so they will try to steal you out of their commissions by either clearing the cookies or replacing your affiliate ID with theirs. You will need to cloak your links to protect yourself from commission theft although some improvements have been made. The refund rate for some products can be really high and cut down on your profits as Clickbank forces you to offer a 60-day policy.

The sales stats and interface are also very limited. To add to that, getting promotional material from vendors can be difficult. You will have to go to the vendor’s site to get it while others do not give you any to work with. Because some vendors do not give you promotional material or just provide you with poorly written ads (even if it’s a great product), you will need to have some experience with copywriting and marketing to come up with your own promotional material that turns into sales. A minor issue is that some consumers do not trust Clickbank products as the network is a host to many vendors that sell low quality biz-opp products.