Clickbank Now Offers Recurring Billing
Clickbank* has long been a favorite marketplace for selling digital products. Apart from managing the sale and delivery of e-books and software for publishers with very little upfront costs, they manage an army of affiliates who will promote a publisher’s products for a commission on the sale. Now, they have added recurring billing to their services!
With recurring billing, Clickbank* will process ongoing membership fees for publishers and allow affiliates from their network to profit from the residual fees. My guess is that affiliates (myself included) will be foaming at the mouth for a chance to promote products with this type of long term residual payout!
It’s time to start making some membership sites!
The Go-To Guy!
* Affiliate Link
I’m hoping that ClickBank takes this further by adding an IPN type feature similar to what PayPal has.
Dave,
There is lots of room for improvement on this one.
I was discussing this with members of the 5 Bucks a Day and Earn 1k a Day forums and they highlighted a few downsides:
1. Clickbank has an 8 week refund window – no questions asked. That gives someone the ability to use the content of the site and download resources for almost 2 months, and then request a refund. The site owner would have no recourse. I think that is a little excessive.
2. Clickbank’s fees are fairly high and this solution might not be as cost effective as others (but it’s nice to not have to manage your own affiliate program.)
3. If you are in the Information Marketing business, many people will buy through their own links to get an effective rebate every month on their own memberships. Outside this marketplace, other customers are probably not aware of how to do this.
There are ways to deal with the first problem like tying membership to some kind of desirable rights or tools. Then people will have a need to stay members. There isn’t much to do about number two but complain and number three is just a cost of doing business with Clickbank.
Still, there is a lot of opportunity here!
The Go-To Guy!
The lack of being able to offer customers a free trial (unlike PayPal) means that Clickbank’s new offering isn’t ideal. I just wish they would allow free trials, as I would then switch over…