Paydot.com? Is it good alternative to Clickbank.

I've used both PayDotCom and ClickBank for a few years now. ClickBank used to be my primary affiliate system, now it's only secondary. Here's why:

1. PayDotCom's reporting is vastly superior to ClickBank.

PayDotCom's reporting capabilities is the Mercedes Sports Car to ClickBank's FourTwo. It gives me so much more information about what's going on with my products.

PDC lets me know how many affiliates have signed up for my products. ClickBank doesn't.

PDC lets me know how many sales each affiliate has made for a variety of time spans. ClickBank doesn't.

PDC breaks down my gross earnings, affiliate payouts, fee costs and net income. ClickBank doesn't.

PDC tells me in a quick snapshot how many refunds and cancellations I've had, how many sales I've made and what my profit is for any date range I want and any group of products I want. ClickBank doesn't.

PDC makes it easy to create custom campaigns and it tracks raw and unique click-throughs, sales counts and conversion rates for me, making it easy to see how well any given promotion converted. ClickBank doesn't.

You can do some of this reporting with CB if you export their results and import them into another application -- but I shouldn't have to do that, and with PDC, I don't.

And with ClickBank you can't get reports run for multiple products in one interface. I don't want to think about how long it would take to run and save the dozens of reports I'd need to for my dozens of products in CB, export them all, merge them all and bring them up in some other app.

2. ClickBank's refund policy is insane. PayDotCom's isn't.

ClickBank will refund a customer for any reason whatsoever, no matter how stupid. PayDotCom uses PayPal, which has a dispute process that gives vendors a much fairer part in the decision of whether or not a refund happens.

I rarely withold a refund from a customer, but CB takes the authority completely out of my hands. PayPal (and, therefore, PDC) doesn't.

3. I have to wait six weeks to get the money from ClickBank. With PayDotCom it goes directly into my PayPal account.

There's really nothing else to say about this point. While the delay isn't the end of the world, I like being in total control of my money immediately.

4. With PayDotCom I can have as many products as I like and group related products (discounts, etc.) together in my reporting.

Again, nothing much more to say on this point.

5. You don't get as many affiliates with ClickBank as you think.

It's no-doubt true that CB has a lot more affiliates than PDC, but guess what? If you're relying on the marketplace to get your affiliates you're not making any real money.

The top 5% of my affiliates earn 80% of my income. I didn't get those big dog affiliates by having my products in the marketplace. I recruited them. If you think your money is coming from the marketplace, then you're missing out big time.

PayDotCom gives your affiliates the same stellar reporting that you get, the same ability to create individual promotional campaigns and more. Very appealing to big affiliates.

Can PDC generate lots of affiliates for a product? Absolutely. One of my products has almost 14,000 affiliates via PDC. I know that because PDC tells me -- ClickBank doesn't give me that information. Which brings me to point #6.

6. PayDotCom lets me email my affiliates from one easy form. ClickBank doesn't even tell me how to get in touch with them.

7. PayDotCom lets me create products that don't appear in the marketplace, and gives me the ability to review affiliates and pick and choose who I allow to promote. ClickBank doesn't.

8. PayDotCom's fees are a lot lower.

ClickBank charges 7% + $1 per transaction. For my average ticket price, ClickBank's fee is almost $6. PayDotCom's fee for the same price tag is $3. Add in PayPal 2.5% and it's about $4.50.

But I don't pay $4.50 per sale, because PayDotCom let's me pre-pay for my fees, saving me 33% and bringing that side of my cost down to $2 per sale, or about $3.50 total.

I save literally thousands of dollars a month because of PayDotCom's pre-pay option. In the last 30 days I pushed 6,384 sales through PayDotCom. Take that $1.50 per sale savings and do the math about how much money PDC saved me.

9. My refund rates are much lower with PayDotCom than ClickBank.

This probably wouldn't be true for you if your products aren't in the IM/SEO niche, but mine are. Everyone in my niche knows that CB will refund with absolutely no questions asked, and many of them take full advantage of that. I've seen refunds in less than 2 minutes after the purchase with a stupid reason like "tried it, don't like it" -- seriously, in two minutes they tried the software? They couldn't install it that fast! Sure enough, CB processed the refund -- no questions asked.

My refund rates with PDC are 1/3 what they were with CB because people have to go through the PayPal dispute process, so these professional refunders don't bother.

10. Because PayDotCom uses PayPal, I get the benefit of PayPal's customer service and back-end capabilities.

Due to my high volume of sales, PayPal has assigned me a personal customer representative, and that saves me countless headaches when dealing with any issues that might arise (though few do).

Using PayPal also means getting the benefit of Instant Payment Notification (which PDC uses and relays to my sites with some additional variables). This is very important, especially for subscription-based services (which CB's support for is limited at best).

It also means I can use PayPal's multi-user setup to allow my staff to handle refunds without having access to my money.

You may not need these higher end features yet, but have fun when you do need them and you're stuck with ClickBank.

That does not mean PayDotCom is perfect.

PDC is not perfect. I've been hopping mad at Mike and the PDC service several times in the past. There were down-time issues and server load issues that happened in the middle of launches that almost made me think about switching back to CB (until I remembered how much money PDC saves me every month).

However, Mike has moved PDC to a cloud-based network, and since that happened the performance has been lightening fast. Reports that used to take minutes to run now take seconds. The server is always fast to respond when I login and setup products or make edits, etc. This was a massive relief to me and has kept me very happy with Mike and PDC.

There have only been two instances of problems since PDC moved to the cloud network, but neither of those was the fault of PDC, and both issues were resolved quickly. Mike also took steps to ensure the problems will not happen again. PDC is growing fast, and no doubt there will be more growing pains. I'm sure they will make me angry when they happen, but I'll stay with PDC because of the ten reasons listed above (and many I'm sure I haven't thought about while writing this).

PDC has gone through some growing pains, for sure. And I agree with the comments that their help desk support could stand to be better, and their staff could respond to threads on their forum more often and more quickly than they do.

PDC is growing, and Mike is sinking serious money and time into it.

There was a time that if somebody asked me who to use for creating a digital product I would have said "ClickBank". I might even have said that a year ago. But not today. Today I say: PayDotCom, baby!

In each and every department clcikbank is far better then pdc because i was with both at same time. 1st their service 2nd no delay to receive checks and last but not the least 3rd mindblowing products....

Thanks

The issue may be that they will ONLY go to 60 days. Some people like to give 365 day or lifetime but CB won't let you go out that far because THEY only go to 60.

I am guessing...

Mike

You bring up a great point. The reason why I use Clickbank is because they have the largest pool of affiliates on the internet. As simple as that. I just put up a product and soon enough people start promoting.

If I had an affiliate manager in charge of nurturing relationships with affiliates then I would maybe consider other options. Maybe. But since this is not my case, I use clickbank. It wouldn't be worth it to save $50 then not make any money because no one is promoting.

I've been looking at all of the options for my own information product and I'm not happy with any of them. I think I'm going to build my own.

Here's what I want:
- way better analytics (like Google Analytics, I want to know how people are reading my book)
- better links (would you click on a link with two subdomains? these look like viruses)
- reliable tracking
- lower fees ($2.50 to get your money seems like nickle-and-diming)
- loss prevention (I don't want people to email or torrent my product)
- more interactive e-books (dynamic upsells?)

I'd love to hear from you guys if I've struck any chords here. What about PDC or Clickbank irks you? Do you prefer to deal with paypal on your own? What's on your wishlist?

Please PM me or respond if you feel passionate about how to make these systems better.