ClickBank is your friend when it comes to earning money on the Internet. They won’t only help you sell your digital products online for a little one time fee, but they also provide a paradise for their affiliates. (More info about ClickBank here)

Recently, more and more people have started to talk about the phenomenon referred to as “The ClickBank Refund Problem”. As their site states: “ClickBank will, at its option, replace or repair any defective product within 8 weeks from the date of purchase.” This is not only a guideline but a very strict rule that vendors have to mention on their sales pages.

When it comes to having your own merchant account, your biggest fear is a “chargeback”. Credit card companies do everything to protect their clients, and when someone walks into his or her bank and requests a chargeback, most of the time their bank will issue it. Of course, the cost of the chargeback will have to be paid by the merchant of the product.

ClickBank will do everything to avoid chargebacks: if there was a large number of chargebacks, they would be forced to close their merchant account. Thus, when a ClickBank customer requests a refund, 99% of the time, they will issue it without asking anything - just to avoid a potential chargeback.

Lately, some people who don’t like to pay for digital products have started to abuse this policy. They will buy a product they’d like to have, and request a refund within a few minutes of the purchase. Many product owners have voiced their worries that “The ClickBank Refund Problem” would eventually force them to close their business or switch to another payment processing company.

Although the problem does affect certain niches (mostly internet marketing and money & business related products) a little bit more, but it’s not really a “ClickBank-wide” issue. I’d say that on average, about 0.5 to 2% of the purchases are made by “refund hijackers”. The rest are honest people who really didn’t like your product.

So if your refund rate is over 2-3%, you are likely doing something wrong.

Here are a few tips for lowering your refund rate:

1. As plain as it sounds, a quality product will always have much less refunds. Of course you won’t be able to create a product that satisfies all of your customers, but your #1 concern should be QUALITY.

2. Offer some bonuses, including unadvertised bonuses that you don’t mention on your sales page. Once I’ve tried a little trick: I split my 100-page e-book into 3 parts: a 70-page book and two bonus booklets of 15 pages. The result? My refund rate decreased from 10% to 5% - just by offering two little bonus booklets.

3. Make sure that your contact information is CLEARLY VISIBLE on your thank you pages. Some angry customers who can’t download the product will contact ClickBank for a refund instead of searching for your whois information

4. There is a wonderful e-book by “ClickBank Guru” Harvey Segal. Stop Those ClickBank Refunds is not only dirt-cheap, but very useful. You even get some tips on how to make a customer change his or her mind about a refund.

Now, I don’t want to ruin Harvey’s business by revealing every technique taught in his e-book. That’d be simply unfair. But if your refund rate is more than 3-4%, I honestly urge you to grab a copy. It’s a short but very useful read - believe it or not, I’ve purchased it myself. So can you.

Click here to visit Stop Those ClickBank Refunds

ClickBank is a third party payment processing company. It means that they will process the credit cards of your customers and send you the money you earned on a check. The biggest advantage of ClickBank is that it also provides you with a complete solution for managing your affiliate program. Thus, it’s the best choice for selling your digital products online.

Your affiliate program will be the main source of your income. Your affiliates help you sell your product by doing the marketing and in turn they get a commission from the price. For digital products, this commission usually ranges from 40% to 75% of the total price. Normally, maintaining an affiliate program requires a strong back-end with expensive scripts and monthly fees. With ClickBank, they do all the work for you and manage your affiliate program.

Here are the advantages and disadvantages of ClickBank.

Advantages:

• If you were to get your own merchant account, you could spend thousands of dollars each month just to have it. With ClickBank, you just need to pay a one-time, $49.95 setup fee and you are ready to sell your product. No monthly fees whatsoever. ClickBank will send you a paycheck twice a month with your earnings.
• ClickBank is VERY RELIABLE. You and your affiliates always get your checks in time, and their servers are almost never down. (The worst that can happen to you is losing money due to the fault of your payment processing company)
• Affiliates can sign up to ClickBank for FREE. Once they get their account, they can start advertising your product with a simple affiliate link.
• ClickBank already has thousands of affiliates. When you start selling your product, you can choose to get listed in the ClickBank marketplace. The best products in the marketplace are picked up and promoted by good affiliates.
• You can set up an unlimited number of paylinks and sell multiple products within one ClickBank account.
• ClickBank now processes PayPal payments too.
• Visitors sent to your site by your affiliates are tracked with hoplinks. (A special system which places cookies on the visitors’ computers) Since cookies stay on the visitors’ computers for a while, your affiliates will get their commission if even the visitor purchases weeks later.

The disadvantages of ClickBank:

• Compared to PayPal for example, they charge a lot. Typically $1 plus 7,5% of the total amount goes to ClickBank per transaction. So if you sell your e-book for $40, you’ll only get $35 per sale. (The good news is that sales processed by affiliates are charged a little bit less)
• It’s very easy to get refunds from ClickBank due to their rigorous refund policy. You can expect a 3-5% refund rate of all purchases. (Depending on your niche and the quality of your product) This is the cost of doing business
• You can only sell digital, downloadable products with ClickBank. No off-line goods are allowed.
• When they send you a check, they’ll withhold a 15% deposit that you’ll only get after 3 months. From time to time, getting paid with checks can be a pain in the ass.
• You can only set one affiliate commission percentage per ClickBank account. When doing joint-ventures or selling multiple products from one account, this can make your life a little bit harder.
• ClickBank isn’t available in all the countries, worldwide. They DO process credit cards from ANY country, but they don’t send affiliate and merchant paychecks to certain countries. (Like Malaysia for example)

Although it has some minor downsides, ClickBank is still the BEST SOLUTION for selling your digital, downloadable products and managing your affiliate program. Unless you expect to make at least $15.000-$20.000 in sales per month, you won’t find an alternative for ClickBank.

Click here to visit their web site and to learn more.