We written a lot about ClickBank on this blog, including our Clickbank review, introduction to ClickBank hoplinks and conversion tracking for ClickBank affiliates. Now we should probably tell about the scary stuff no one told you about ClickBank.
Unlike most affiliate networks, there’s a real good chance that you will never get paid from ClickBank unless you’re making regular commissions via their network. Here are three reasons why.
1. You Need To Make At Least 5 Sales to Get Paid
You will never get paid if you make one or two sales. In fact, you need to make at least 5 sales (best case scenario) to actually get paid the first time.
According to ClickBank:
ClickBank will withhold payment of any account balance until the following criteria is met:
- Sales made with 5 or more different credit card numbers; and,
- Sales made with two different payment methods (either Visa, MasterCard, PayPal or European Direct Debit(ELV)). Note: PayPal purchases do not count toward the minimum 5 different credit card numbers.
This requirement is in place to help prevent Affiliates from abusing the ClickBank Affiliate program by using their accounts for the sole purpose of fraudulently collecting rebates and/or discounts on their own purchases.
Once you have met the Customer Distribution Requirement, your account will begin issuing payments normally, in accordance with our Accounting Policy, beginning on the next payment issuing date.
What this means is that a single sales doesn’t matter. 100 affiliate sales don’t matter either if everyone paid via their VISA credit cards or PayPal. Make sure you understand this requirement, as it closely relates to the next shocking fact you never knew about ClickBank.
2. There’s a “Dormant” Fee Up to $100 a Month
Yes, if you do not make any new commissions, ClickBank will penalize you for it. Deductions start at $1 per “Pay Period” which is every two weeks in ClickBank.
According to ClickBank:
Accounts with a positive balance but no earnings for an extended period of time are considered dormant. Dormant accounts are subject to a charge of $1 per pay period after 90 days of no earnings, $5 per pay period after 180 days of no earnings, and $50 per pay period after 365 days of no earnings.
The above example is from one of my joint venture ClickBank accounts. Unfortunately, after the initial sales for this product none of the partners (including me) bothered to do anything about the income. We thought we’ll just leave it there till be can get more JV partners to promote the product. That never happened however.
From several thousand dollars in the year 2007/08 you can see how this had depleted to $0 simply because this account was dormant and we had set the minimum payout to $5,000. Last year we had $50 deducted from our account every pay period, which is biweekly, resulting in a $100 deduction per month. Needless to say in a couple of months our earnings were completely wiped out.
I only realized this after checking that dormant account. We should have taken the money out sooner while there was still something to be paid out.
3. You May Never Get Paid
If you decide to promote Clickbank products, you need to keep it going till you get past the minimum 5 sales requirement, and set your minimum payout as low as possible, to actually start getting paid. If you decide to “take a break” from ClickBank you may return a year later to find that your earnings have disappeared.
There’s a real chance that you may never get paid from ClickBank despite all your hard work promoting their products as an affiliate. Be glad you read this!
49 Responses
WOW, The screen shot shock me!
I can say that I’m not always the best at reading manuals or such, but how deep did you have to go to unearth this information. I was aware of 3 mailed checks before auto deposit but I have never seen this information.
Yet, I don’t ever see myself leaving $5,000 in any ClickBank account.
Actually, it’s in ClickBank’s accounting policy: http://www.clickbank.com/accounting.html
Been there, done that, yes they will start sucking $2,$5 or more out of your account on a weekly basis. I finally prevailed upon them to release a $100 after they had depleted the account by $50, now I am going into the negative. On top of that I think I am losing commissions due to theft, My tracking says I am sending clicks their way, their tracking says it never happened. I wish Pay Dot Com represented more of the niches I am involved with.
Thanks for this post.
Michael Brown
Thanks for the reminder Gobala. Most of the time we don’t bother to go deep into any network’s policy. So your tip is a crucial reminder to us whenever we join any network in the future.
So good affiliate sell got it..
What about the affiliate link? If people promote the product and people click, look, leave and then the guru sends a few mailings out and the person clicks their link and buys who gets the commission? The guru guy right?
So most people are out there greasing the wheels for the big list owners and advertisers. Find a couple of partners and only buy through each others links and call it a day! I want to start my OWN affiliate network – how hard can it be? Partners wanted. Anyone? Darn it!
I think you’re referring to “last cookie referrer” – -that’s common in almost all type of affiliate programs. The last person to refer overwrites earlier affiliates cookies and he gets the commissions. Doesn’t really matter is he’s a “guru” or god or the devil. You too may have benefited from last cookie referral, you just don’t know about it.
Setting your minimum to 5000 is not very smart. you know better than to overlook something like that, or you should.
they deducted out of my dormant account too for a few months came to around 140.00, no biggy.
this stuff is like survival of the fittest in a very real sense.:)
So set your minimum payout to $10, duh…
why in the hell should they even be allowed this crazy practice of “punishment”, I mean, they get to keep their cash longer in their “bank”. the people who actually makes them all that cash in the first place are put in a insano system where they first are having a hard time getting their salary, then it’s being depleted,haha crazy fools!!
but I guess it’s a “private bank”, just like your “federal reserves”, hahahaha!!!!
Gobala,
I was looking to review some affiliate programs for a client who wants to do this. Thanks for sharing this invaluable information!
I minimum of 5 sales is ridiculous!
Thanks again,
Jupiter Jim
Hi Gobala
I’ve heard some shockers in my time, but this certainly takes the biscuit.
It’s so common that we just tick the Terms & Conditions checkbox and hit the [Sign Me Up] button, without actually reading the policies and being aware of penalties. It’s like putting your signature to a contract you haven’t read – albeit digital.
The legalese is boring but I for one will try to take more time reading policies here on out.
If you don’t mind I’d like to send my site visitors to this post to make them more aware too.
(email me if that’s a problem)
Thanks for sharing,
Marcy
I am so disappointed and consider clickbank to be a scam. They swindled me out of my hard earnt money, by deducting monies from my account just because I did not reduce the threshold payment, which again, was due to my ignorance. For newbies, don’t please trust them, you would think that if you had credit in your account, they would be earning interest on it. In fact, they are scamming you by deducting money from your account if you take no action and are in credit. This is a nasty business and I hate them for it.
Hi Gobala,
Thank you for sharing this invaluable information. As Marcy said, I never take the time to read all the terms and conditions. To be honest, I was not aware of these 5 sales minimum nor that there were some penalties for not making any subsequent commissions.
I guess we have to spread the word. If you don’t mind, can I point my readers to your page? This way they can read the information themselves.
Thank you again for sharing.
Best regards,
Gerard
I have more than 5 sales and I got paid. My question is there any requirements on rebilling as I have over 5 sales in rebill but no fresh sales. There is no more new sales this month but I have 9 sales from rebill would that affect my payment process ?
Do paypal sales count toward 5 sales or not ? i did 3 sales via paypal and 2 via credit cards visa and still its showing cdr status in paychecks plus plus they dont answering my support ticket anymore how ridiculous.
Interesting, didn’t realize there were penalties for this. They now have new penalties related to return and chargeback rates, which are even more difficult to track per unit than seeing the blanket (in your case $50) penalty.
Clickbank are theives, nothing more, nothing less. I watched my balance slowly trickly from $59 to $0 over a few months. Nothing justifies stealing webmasters’ money. I will no doubt be removing their products from my site.
thanks a lot Gobala for this precious info, man your great. I don’t think i want to be affiliated with clickbank anymore..any suggestions on how can i deactivate my a/c. Thanks once again
I came to know about clickbank affiliate program around 2 months ago. I then created a website http://www.magyjobs.com and placed several clickbank affiliate links with bannners, widgets and text ads. I then published an ad on our local newspaper. Guess, what? My expectations were crushed !!! No commisions at all. I am sure people would have bought the products as these were employment, work from home related products. However clickbank did not even give me a penny.
I don’t think this is ClickBank’s problem. It’s because you don’t know how to make sale and / how to track your marketing results. For example, how many people saw your newspaper ad? Unless it’s a headliner (which is not) you probably didn’t get many visitors from your ad.
Things seem to be changing for the best (in Clickbanks eyes) and for the worst (in an affiliates eyes). Yes you will need the time to hit 5 sales, but then you get hit with the ‘one type of every sale before we pay you’ policy – (a visasale – a paypalsale etc – explained in more detail elsewhere in this blog), so no payment until that criteria is filled.
Now you are up and running on autopilot?
Nope – once you meet all the above criteria and the payments start rolling in you can only get paid by check for the first three payouts (and if you live outside the US, pay your bank a premium for cashing your CB check)… only then you can go on automatic billing.
And when you are finally on automatic payment to your checking account you can sit back and wait for the payments to roll in every two weeks as per their ‘t&c’s’.
Nope.
Here is where it can be really wierd.
I’m on a $250 payment trigger, on the 8th May I had $183 pending. Since then I have made a further $244 in sales, and this should have been incorporated into my CB account for payment on the 22nd – but today, on the 28th, my report still says ‘pending’ with sales of $183, and I’ve just made another sale!
Looks like one set of t&c’s for Clickbank and another set for the customer.
JVZOO anyone?
lucky me, i just want to sign up to clickbank
wow this is plain daylight robbery upon all the work the affiliates have put in
Wow, I almost agreed to promote a product. What a scam. Thank you for the heads up. It really is too bad. Many affiliate marketers work so hard and this is blind robbery. I can’t believe that with the technology and great minds in the computer world, ClickBank can’t fond a better way to monitor sales.
I knew this already that is why i ´ll try other platforms, this is almost a scam what clickbank is doing, they must change this rules inmidiately or people will stop working with them. I will try JZvoo
Well I was excited when I made some sells with clickbank that gross me $82.00 now that $82.00 is at $30.00 wtf.
It’s going to be a long time before you can get that out as well. Sorry bro 🙂
Yes I too did not get about $700. All eaten up by what they call dormant inactivity.
I had a $10. Payment set for my account and never got one payment so I thought I was not making any money.
I decided to check my account and found I had $700. In earnings.
When I asked to get payed they told me their was no money because of account dormant fees!!!!
How underhanded can you fey?????
I found this information in the summer. I did read the terms and conditions, but I did not fully realize what they were doing. I couldn’t believe it. I emailed the Click Bank affiliate leader to check on the details. Oh yes, it was true.
Bottom line – an affiliate must be a high powered seller in order to survive with Click Bank. I think we should continue to email and repeat this message again and again. Blacklist this company! Affiliates work hard for their money and this is a crime. There are lots of other programs that treat their “partners” better.
Can you please sugges us any website who will pay. I was going to sign up on click bank but thank you bro…..now please sugges some websites.
I’m promoting a couple of Clickbank Products. And they are a hard sell. Cheese ball video type ads that people don’t have time to sit through and then pay at the end of it. All these fees are not fair to affiliates who do all the work and put up their own money to even get the sales and hard work. You are better off learning all about how to market products and Clickbank can eat dirt. Make money with other companies and your own products. Become a master of marketing. You can sell rocks. I actually sold rocks on the side of the road as paper weights so anything is possible.
JVZOO definitly. Clickbank is just a Mafia Outfit and You will lose big time .You have been warned !!!
Thanks a lot for your information. So, basically, the thing works like this right?
1. I managed to get 100$ through clickbank for the past 2 years.
2. I went dormant for about a year and as a result i lost my !00$ that i never took out of my account, because i was too lazy for it.
Now my question is: The charges are only going to be taken out of the money i earned JUST from CLICKBANK, right?
Or are they going to take money away from my credit card or charge me with fees and take me to court or something like that?
Hope my thoughts are clear, english is not my native language, thanks.
ClickBank will only take the money you have in your ClickBank account.
Thanks, i was a little bit confused there.
No problem. But it still sucks when you realize this for the first time and it’s a little too late, your account is down to zero like mine.
That’s The reason Why I hate to use Clickbank. Thanks for stating these facts to users Gobala. Great Job Man. I think that this is ridiculous Requirement set by clickbank. It will will not prevent spamming but will surely helps clickbank to steal money cleverly.
Just found out the hard way. Like you I left money in my account. $248 down to $0 because I have been busy with other things. They are as suspect as 90% of the crap that they pedal. How they are allowed to continue with their business beggars belief. I’m sure that in most other civilized countries they would be branded a scam and shut down. I use click2sell now as a vendor and affiliate. I find them fair and ethical. My affiliates get paid if they make a sale, no matter how small. That’s far better for my reputation too.
Thanks for this useful information. I was researching clickbank as an affiliate program and also saw their training videos and steps to get started as an affiliate. But it was a good move to do a ” Clickbank review ” on Google first before getting into their Marketplace or finding products and Vendors. I am a happy man!
I recently created my product on clickbank and soon it should be ready.
I have super solution for this major problem, contact me via email if any of you needs help. I would love to share this publicly but i wont.
thanks for understanding. (admin@pashagroups.com
Can anyone recommend a a company thats more honest/ethical than clickbank?
I know I’m a little bit late to the whole debate, but I recently made an account with them, got the first 5 customers in a week according to the Customer Distribution Report policy. One of the clients did a chargeback.
Clickbank promptly “Suspended” my account (that’s why they call it instead of ban), and kept the remaining $400 I made for that week. I immediately stopped promoting the hoplink, however they are now the law, judge and jury in all of this. They also kept my $400!! (no chance of seeing any of it). I emailed them and they replied with “Sorry, your account has been suspended indefinitely until further proof that chargeback percentage volume will decrease. Please advise.”
Oh yes, right! As if I’m going to keep sending referrals to a “suspended” account so that the chargeback volume decreases. And yes the account does have 1 chargeback out of the first 6 sales, but this is utterly ridiculous from their part. So not only they kept my money from all the other sales, but banned me from using their services again. Way to go Clickbank.
Thanks that i read your review Gobala..
Just made my first sale on ClickBank. I wasn’t aware of these rules before, so thanks for the information.
Thanks Gobala for useful information. Are you still active promoting Clickbank products at this moment? Honestly, what do you think about Clickbank Affiliate program? It’s still good for newbie to join their affiliate program?
It would be nice to see a complete list of affiliate-vendor outfits for comparing.
It seems they’ve changed the policy
Customer Distribution Requirement
ClickBank will withhold payment of any balance until an account shows a minimum of 5 sales using at least two of the following payment methods:
American Express
Carte Bleue
Diners Club
Discover
ELV (European Direct Debit)
JCB
Maestro
MasterCard
PayPal
Visa
This requirement is in place to help prevent Affiliates from abusing the ClickBank Affiliate program by using their accounts for the sole purpose of fraudulently collecting rebates and/or discounts on their own purchases.
Once you have met the Customer Distribution Requirement, your account will begin issuing payments normally, in accordance with our Accounting Policy, beginning on the next payment issuing date.