A follow up from Clickbank

Guest post by Dush Ramachandran, Vice President Business Development and Marketing, ClickBank

Apparently my earlier blog post titled “Why you should choose ClickBank” was widely read. I am flattered and honored that so many people took the time to comment on my post. Since many of the comments on that post dealt with what various people thought were drawbacks with ClickBank, I thought I would respond to the comments in this post.

1. Global Reach of ClickBank: One of the commentators suggested that ClickBank has a poor knowledge of world geography. The individual did not explain how they came to that conclusion, but perhaps it is an allusion to ClickBank being largely English language and US Dollar centric. While that has been true for a quite a while, ClickBank has made major strides in the last year. We have launched our order forms in Spanish, German and French and have started accepting transactions in 13 international currencies in addition to the US Dollar. Since these enhancements were released our international sales have increased significantly.
2. Marketplace Organization: We definitely agree that the ClickBank marketplace is due for an overhaul.  Here are three key areas that we are looking into
   • To address the product search needs we have created several ways by which the marketplace can be navigated. There is the category navigation where the user can choose a category, and then a sub-category and find a product within that subcategory. Alternatively, the user may search for a product using search strings at any level of the marketplace categories. We are exploring more intuitive ways of product search to make the marketplace easier to use.  
   • As we currently allow vendors to categorize their own products in two categories, sometimes products do come up in incorrect categories based on the way they have been categorized by the vendor. We need to explore standardizing marketplace categorization and ensuring the products are categorized appropriately when they are first listed.
   • Gravity is a potentially useful marketplace statistic, which we could do a better job of explaining. Briefly it is a calculated number which reflects the recent attractiveness of a product to affiliates. It takes into account net sales for a product (i.e. sales less refunds), the number of affiliates promoting the product and the recency of these sales. Affiliates looking to get an early mover advantage on a product would choose a product with low gravity, and others who prefer to promote products that are more popular and established could choose products with higher gravity.
3. Payment Options: One poster suggested that we need to have payment options other than checks in countries other than the US. PayPal’s MassPay option allows payments to only 10,000 accounts. The number of accounts to which we make payments each pay period far exceeds that number, which renders the PayPal option unusable for us.  However, ClickBank offers free direct deposit in 17 countries worldwide, and international USD wire transfers are available around the world for select clients.
4. Approved Countries:  There have been a number of comments about the countries from which ClickBank does not accept accounts. The primary reason that we restrict accounts from some countries is the rampant prevalence of internet fraud in those countries. ClickBank processes over 26,000 transactions a day and sells more than 35,000 products from 12,000 different vendors. We simply cannot put that amount of business at risk by opening ourselves up to known high-risk countries. However, we do revise and update this list quite frequently based on our constantly updated security and fraud control data. For instance, Turkey and South Africa were once on the restricted list but we now accept clients from these countries. So if your country is on the restricted list right now, check back in a little while and the restriction could have been lifted.

I hope this addresses most of the questions and comments so far. Please keep the comments and ideas coming. We enjoy hearing from you and would very much like your thoughts on what ClickBank could do to improve our services to you.