I have to buy something on ClickBank

That has nothing to do with it being your own link.

Some affiliate tracking mistakes are made. ClickBank's system has never been 100% reliable, and still isn't.

It's a random error. In my opinion.

There are always a lot of "opinions" expressed about this subject. The facts are that you can buy through your own affiliate link, and that you can qualify under the CDR (or - under different circumstance - to avoid the dormant account charges) by buying a cheap product that way.

Vendors who don't like affiliates buying through their own accounts should sell their products elsewhere (and some of them do).

This is how so many of those "IM products" have such huge gravities: it's because each customer is buying a single copy that way and adding a point onto the gravity score in the process. It doesn't mean that anyone's actually promoting them. And it doesn't mean that the total number of sales is necessarily much higher than the gravity figure, either. It's easy to misinterpret these things.

That chocolate-cake recipe e-book I linked to above, at one time, used to make quite a significant proportion of its sales that way, because it was well known as a "good, cheap product to buy through your own link, if you need to". (That seems no longer to be the case now, judging by its gravity figure, perhaps because its price has gone up to $5 and there are cheaper products available for this purpose, including the one mentioned by our feline friend, above. I hasten to mention - if it needed saying - that I have absolutely no connection or involvement with either product, myself. I did once buy the chocolate cake one, but that was just because I didn't want to recommend it to anyone, even here, to buy through their own link, without trying it myself!).