Paypal or Clickbank?

Each of Clickbank and Paypal has it's place. We're talking about your use of them, and for the moment ignoring that clickbank can use Paypal as a payment method.

If you are selling a few products with fixed prices for each, and no affiliates, then Paypal can work reasonably for you. You convert your personal account to a business one, and then you can create [buy now] buttons that have unique characteristics that key them to a sales name and price on Paypal. Each one calls a download page that you provide and can also have a cancellation page (where, perhaps you try to recover the sales interest or offer a different product for sale]. The plus side of this is that you can sell items without too much of an issue. The minus side of this is that your work increases exponentially as your number of products and affiliates increase. Also, affiliates are often hard to convince to go "direct" instead of through a third party like Clickbank.

Once you have more than a few products and/or a few affilates, using Clickbank or a similar service is essential if you value your time. Yes, you pay them a commission, which is deducted before you and the affiliate share the remaining revenue, but they handle a number of issues, including the collection of the money, and dealing with returns. They are looked at as a trusted agent, so it is easier to attract affiliates because they get paid when you do, not after or from you. By the way, there is also a $49 per item registration/setup charge when you set up each item with Clickbank.

To test if an ebook sells, Paypal can get some sales under your belt at no cost. Once you know you are getting sales (your sales page is working, traffic is flowing, etc) you will probably need to move to Clickbank to attract affiliates and handle the overhead processes. For this, you pay them their $49.95 registration fee, and they "buy the product from you" for 92.5% less $1. You and the affiliate split this if you set the affiliate percentage at 50%.

As you can see, each has good and bad points, but the bad points are overcome by the good.

I think Paypal and Clickbank are a little different in terms of what they offer. Paypal is basically just a payment system for you to accept money from purchasers, and it is a kind of merchant account/payment processor. You do not pick up any affiliates through Paypal itself, because that is not what it is designed for.

Clickbank is an all-digital product marketplace that has many affiliates promoting it, and you can expect to get at least some of them promoting your product if it does well there. It also happens to be a payment processor that collects your payments and sends them on to you. Coincidentally, Paypal is one of the forms of payment for Clickbank, so you can opt to be paid directly to your Paypal account from Clickbank.

There's really no direct comparison between the two, and it'd be hard to compare them side by side as they accomplish different tasks.

Paul