I have been a Clickbank customer for well over two years and probably even used Clickbank before I got interested in internet marketing without even knowing it. Clickbank is a fantastic service that I highly recommend to internet marketers that I coach, but there a few things that just simply need to be addressed.
What follows is an open letter to the management of Clickbank.com.
Dear Clickbank,
I am a happy customer of Clickbank.com. I use your service both as an affiliate promoting products from the Clickbank marketplace and as a publisher having several products listed in the marketplace myself.
As I have often pointed out to my readers at MasonWorld.com, there are many advantages to using Clickbank as a service for publishing digital products. Chief among those is the high level of customer service you provide in handling refunds, collecting taxes, tracking and promoting to affiliates, and reporting transactions through your analytics service.
In fact, with regard to those features of your services, I couldn’t be happier. I do however have a problem that I cannot for the life of me understand why you have not addressed, and that is the problem of commission theft.
Now, I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a huge Clickbank client. I know that you have many clients that are selling products on Clickbank in volumes 100 times or more higher than my small amount. But, even looking at my list of transactions from the past three months I can see an unusually high number of purchases of my products made by people with only one hop credited to their affiliate ID.
What this tells me is that people are finding my product, clearing their cookies, and purchasing the product through their own affiliate link. This is not a new problem and it’s been reported by many other bloggers over the last two years. My concern is why hasn’t Clickbank done more to solve this problem?
There are many other affiliate scripts available in the marketplace that do a better job protecting affiliates. For example, some affiliate scripts use IP tracking in addition to cookies, some affiliate scripts enforce the first cookie as opposed to the last cookie, and some affiliate scripts allow you to obfuscate the payment vendor on the order form.
It seems very simple to me that Clickbank should be able to address this problem of commission theft by offering product sellers the option to enable new features that enforce the first cookie, add tracking in addition to cookies that would identify the referrer, and help obfuscate the fact that Clickbank is being used as a merchant.
Sadly, I can only think of one reason that Clickbank would not be working to solve this problem. That is loss of sales that come from stolen commissions.
Here’s what I mean. I think that Clickbank must believe that if they take away people’s ability to steal commissions or in effect to get an instant discount that sales will go down. After all, there must be a certain amount of people who won’t buy a $97 product, but they will buy a $97 product if they can get half of that amount back by stealing the commission. Once sales go down that will mean that Clickbank will get a reduced number of sales based fees deposited in their coffers.
Now, that may be a cynical view, and I’d love to hear from Clickbank if that’s not the case, but I can’t think of any other good reason why Clickbank wouldn’t enable features to protect affiliates.
Clickbank’s fees are already some of the higher fees in the affiliate script space in my experience, but I would be willing to pay additional amounts of fees to protect my affiliates. I know that some super affiliates are not promoting my products because they’re listed in the Clickbank marketplace. In fact, in a couple of cases I’ve had to set up special promotions directly through PayPal to satisfy super affiliates that wanted to promote my product.
So, again, Clickbank, I ask you. How many sales are you really losing? If super affiliates are refusing to promote Clickbank products, and I believe that in some cases they are, wouldn’t it make sense to go ahead and enable optional protections for those affiliates so that people could use Clickbank without having to worry about commission theft?
I just simply don’t understand. I’d appreciate a response that would help me understand why you’re dragging your feet on this important topic in the internet marketing space.
Thanks and best regards,
Mark Mason – MasonWorld.com
They don’t pay the affiliate until he’s made a couple of sales paid with different credit cards. That will hinder most drive by affiliates, but:
What happens with all the money that Clickbank doesn’t pay the affiliate that don’t pass that threshold?
I agree that they do this, and I like that rule (speaking as a person who wants to stop commission theft). Of course, they hold those commission until the accounting requirements are met. I suspect that they eventually keep the money if the affiliate never meets the requirements — but I don’t actually know.
Mark,
This raises my eyebrows now to a point where it is hard to close my eyes.
I have been working on a different gripe with clickbank and have been logging my results over the past week.
In my opinion clickbank does not credit my account for hops and in that case most likely does not credit my account with at least some of those hops that might convert to a sale.
I called it to their attention a couple of months ago and they sent a lame excuse about not crediting java scrip hops. BS. Mine are not java script hops. I cloak all of my links behind a WP plugin called wp-125 which will let you place a banner in the widget and the affiliate link is not seen by the reader. This plugin has a counter on it.
So in just this past week I have had 199 clicks on my plugin counter that went out to three different CB products. Clickbank only reported 39 hops! WTF? There is no way a bot could generate a click from my site using the plugin. Why would they not report the right amount of clicks coming in as hops?
So the only think I can think of is that they are making sales of products to my readers without paying me the commission, or at least it would seem that is possible.
A few months ago when I got all twisted up with this same problem I had one case where one of my readers purchased an expensive product through my site, told me about it, and I did not get paid for it. When I asked clickbank about it they again gave me some lame excuse about they had some computer problems during that accounting period. Never did get paid for it and the worse part is it has a monthly recurring fee that I will never see either.
Now I have to be concerned with the points that you bring up and wonder if it is worthwhile giving them any more of my money.
I couldn’t agree with you more.. I let people know if I share a aff link, but I know people will still buy with there own link to save money before they will “support” you and your blog.
It sucks but the reality is CB won’t do much about this till enough affiliates complain. I think your reasoning for why CB hasn’t made a fix to this is right.
In the end they are not losing sales from stolen commissions.. only the affiliate is.
I am not usually this observant on my clickbank account. But, now that I know this. I will surely keep an eye on it. What if other affiliates are made to sign in your open letter too? Would really tell clickbank that a lot are already complaining.
Thanks Mark – great letter. And, then there’s folks like me – I’ve got a few sites up and am getting some decent traffic, but I haven’t quite figured out how to bring in the onslaught of sales that I see all the gurus raving about – and I start asking “why would I think about promoting clickbank products if there’s so much thievery going on?”. We all know what that type of procrastination does.
Sadly – it almost becomes like MLM (gasp) at that point – the gurus are waving their huge checks around, while all the peons are wondering why their traffic does not convert into similar checks.
Kent F.
Mark, Great Letter. I have’nt been in the business that long but I do make myself aware of all the places I promote and have seen exactly what you describe. As, a fairly new marketer the clickbank way of playing the numbers really makes you want top turn your back on them….kinda like they are doing. Thank again.
Well-written article to Clickbank regarding the issue of stolen commissions. 🙂
I believe the reason they haven’t raised the issue or attempted to fix it is because the percentage of people who are affected by it is a tiny percentage. It only affects people who know about it, who are Internet marketers and then you also have to cut it down to the percentage of those who actually act on it.
Most clickbank products are not IM related, so it’s a minor issue to them.
You know, this may very well play into there thinking. I know they have a ton of non-IM products, but I wonder what percentage of the revenue is non-IM. I am sure that the IM stuff sells better than the non-IM stuff.