Somebody needs to petition ClickBank...

Hi Allen,

I pointed Jennifer from Clickbank to this thread - she takes requests very seriously (she's implemented a number of mine in the past ), so she'll probably put it forward to the rest of the Clickbank team and see what they think.

It'll be interesting to hear what they think!

cheers
Sam

I don't really use CB in my business at all, but could you explain to me how the ability to approve affiliates would stem the tide of theft?

I just don't get the correlation.

-Kathy

Yes, it would definitely be a great option to be able to approve your affiliates.

By clickbank theft, I would guess that people will sign up as affiliates, only to buy the product via their affiliate link (thus reducing their cost of the product significantly, depending ont he affiliate benefits).

By being able to choose and approve your candidates for affiliates, you may limit the number of affiliates and/or only approve high-flying, well-known and effective marketers to become your affiliate to promote your product only.

As such, more money earned per product sold.

I can't imagine that many vendors would want to use this.

Why limit your number of affiliates and thus your sales?

By the way if someone from ClickBank does read this thread I'd just like to throw in there that I'd be happy to pay a higher fee for this feature. Like a premium account or something.

Would be well worth it...

here's a possible solution:

set up a seperate cb account for the product, and do NOT put it into the marketplace.

Now it can not be found.

If someone wants to promote it, they need to give you their cb id. you then go to:
HopLink Shield - ClickBank
and generate an 'encrypted' link and send it back to them.

you might also want to cloak the payment link on the sale spage, so someone can't use it to get your vendor id and create their own hoplink.

edit: the gist of this is this - without it being in the marketplace, and without knowing the vendor id, the only way anyone will be able to get a hoplink is through you

The main reason I hate to promote CB products is because so many product owners put that big "Join our affiliate program" link at the bottom of their sales page.

It might as well say "Here's a great way to steal from the person who invested their time and money to bring you to this page."

i like this idea too. as much as i love CB, it still has some holes in it.

Hi guys

i use paydotcom to manually approve affiliates it means that if i want to offer one of my products for the reduced price with a jv its a really easy way of doing it without having to mess around with proof of sales etc.

kind regards


sam
X

Don't you think that one of the things that makes CB so popular is that it's so easy to promote virtually ANY product sold on CB as an affiliate?

Honestly, I'm not sure what the benefits are for what you're proposing vs. just setting up a site using Rapid Action Profits, which offers you everything you're looking for.

I mean, if you want to limit who sells your stuff, that means you probably have a list of people you'd prefer to JV with. Then there's everybody else.

Another way to solve the problem is what RAP does -- you don't get a commission until your 2nd (or 3rd) sale. Many hi-tech product vendors do this -- anybody can purchase at wholesale, but you have to purchase a minimum number of pieces before they'll give you a discount. Often that's 2 or 3.

Just thinkin' ...

-David

Personally, I'm glad for any affiliate that promotes my products. I'm not too fussed on which ones join as long as they bring in $$ :-)

This feature seems to be already in place, but not yet available to all vendors.
Only approved affiliates were able to promote the recent commissionblueprint2 launch. Click this to see what happens using an unapproved affiliate link: http://xxxxx.comblue2.hop.clickbank.net/


Andrew

Clickbank are implementing LOADS of new stuff lately and I think this is one of those things they would definitely implement (dunno about asking for higher prices though lol)...

CB are working HARD to make sure they stay number 1.

With regards to people stealing commissions. It's REALLY not a big issue in non-IM niches, it happens WAY less than you'd think... but if you're selling IM info to IM'ers, there's no way I would sell it via CB confidently.

If this feature would help eliminate this issue, it can only be a good thing.

Yeah, people are always buying through their own links and stealing my affiliate's sales :-(

People buying thru their links -- I see a little bit of it, but not as much as I'd expect.

You can always put roadblocks to slow the commission-stealers down, such as using things like Adrian Ling's Easy Click Mate.

Some of the payment paths that you can set up also can slow the commission stealers way down.

You aren't going to (easily) stop the people who buy from their own link any more that grocery stores will stop people from popping a grape in their mouths while shopping.

PayDotCom, I hear, makes it so you can't buy through your own link, but I'm sure there are ways around that.

Live JoyFully!

Judy

Allen,

Do you know how many HONEST people that will affect!?!?!? TONS! And vendors, if they don't have auto approval, may end up losing business. Maybe clickbank should add an API, like they should have had already to select vendors.

BTW the marketplace CAN automatically put your ID in it!

And whatever happened to that NEW method they had!? At least a couple years ago, they had one that ONLY set the ID from a webpage, and it had to have an embedded time. It couldn't be defeated NEARLY as easily as the old one. Of course, that would make ebooks, and the OLD links fail, but allen's idea could be WORSE!

And don't forget, sometimes a delayed sale, or one at a higher price, is a LOST sale.

Steve

While I agree it would be a great feature for Clickbank, if you want to protect your affiliates...

1. Don't have a link to your affiliate scheme on the front page.

2. Cloak the hoplink. Even better, allow your top affiliates to have their own cloaked redirection on your domain, ie...
yoursite .com/offers/allensays ... redirecting to the main page via Allen's hoplink.

3. Cloak your order button. Again, a simple PHP page is all that's needed to do this. Point your button to page.php and use something like this...

... where "1" is the product number, and "vendorid" is your Clickbank vendor nickname.

4. Don't list your product in the Clickbank marketplace.

This won't completely prevent commission "theft", but it will eliminate all but the most stubborn.

The only drawback is you may get less affiliates, but in return you might attract a better QUALITY affiliate, since you're clearly doing what you can to protect their earnings.

(You would obviously need to promote your affiliate program in some other way.)

So why aren't people cloaking their order buttons as well? Doh.

All the cloaking and disguising in the world doesn't help a bit if the product is in the Clickbank Marketplace. As soon as the person hits the buy button and sees the Clickbank form, all they have to do is go to CB and get their own link. So I doubt all this software cloaking is going to deter too many people. Let's face it. As it now stands, Clickbank is the easiest affiliate program there is for buying from yourself. This is why, as others have mentioned, that I don't promote IM products at all.

Clickbank knows what computer each affiliate use (at least they can track this with IP). So if you used that computer with the same affiliate code/username as you use to logg into cb, the commission would be given to the 2. last aff.

And if you logg into your cb account again after you have bought from your same ID, you would see that as a refund in your account (or a new code)

I know that you can get around this as well, but it starts to get difficult at this point. Less people would know how to do this.

Here is what I need:

An API that I can call from my server that makes Payment through Clickbank just like I do for the gateway provider for my merchant accounts.

I don't want to send my customers to Clickbank or any other site to make the payment, it needs ot be done silently in the background once the customer enters their information on my PCI certified server.

Also, PayPal Pro can do this and it's brilliant except I'm from Ireland and it's not supported there (they offer PayLink or PayFlow or something like that).

Sean

It's not your product though and all you want is for them to look at the sales page. Although I don't promote things I haven't tried, I don't think it's wrong. If I write 15 articles to drive traffic you could well view it is dishonest as I wouldn't have written them if I didn't have an affiliate link.

Agreed, being able to approve affiliates is important and they are definitely losing money over it. However I do a lot on CB right now and it has not been as bad as most people say. However you have to do it in niches where you are not as concerned about how people promote. Think about your niche and whether it is sensitive to advertising methods (for example the IM niche is not) and that may help you to decide on whether to promote through CB or not.

You beat me to it, Harvey Jen sent me the same message, so she's definately on top of it!

cheers
Sam

wow all great points i didn't know it was this rampant. Great thread and great discussion. Sounds like there definitely needs to be something done about this problem.

Actually, you are allowed. You just arent allowed for the sole purpose.

Garrie

The encrypted hoplink is a joke. Anyone who knows the "secret" can decrypt it in seconds. Don't believe me? Create one and post it here. I'll post back the decrypted version. Case closed.

Ok I'm a bit lost here. Say you have the option of approving affiliates.

A person who wants to buy through their own affiliate link can just sign up and ask to be approved. So unless you are going to be ultra selective and only add people you know, how do you know before hand whether they are going to use their own link and hence not approve them??

Hey All,

For those that don't think affliate commission theft is rampant ... think again. I've tested this myself using my own tracking and have seen up to 61% of my commissions stolen on a ClickBank product.

How did I test it? Simple ...

My link redirects to an analytics program that sets a cookie on the visitors system, the analytics program then redirects to the ClickBank site ...

On the "Thank You" page for the ClickBank product, I implemented a pixel tracker from the analytics program ...

Think of how Google Analytics works ... you can track just about anything with a few lines of code.

Now, I set my cookie to expire after one hour ... and the reason for this was to see if people were really going to ClickBank through my link, and then immediately buying through their own link.

I guess some people might come back later ... but an hour or less is going to be affiliate commission hijacking in almost all cases.

For a couple my tests, I was the owner of the product, so implementing the pixel on the thank you page wasn't a problem ... but, if you're promoting for someone else, the odds of getting them to put your tracking, on their thank you page, is slim to none.

In any case, affiliate commission theft through ClickBank is HUGE ... and one of the big reasons I don't promote many CB products. I know I'll earn 50% - 70% of what I should be earning.

NOTE: All of my testing was done using IM/Make Money type products ...

On one side, I can understand why CB wouldn't want to "fix" this ... they get paid on all sales, so they could care less who the affiliate is. They probably make a good chunk of change on sales from people who wouldn't pay full price, but are willing to pay the "discounted" price going through their own link ...

On the other side, I know a lot of people who won't put their products on CB, and who won't promote CB stuff for this reason ...

I have no idea which way CB is going to make more money, but if I had to guess, I'd think they'd be better off NOT implementing the whitelist on products under a specific price point because they'd likely make less money due to lost sales ...

My understanding on the "whitelist" for affiliates was to make sure that the affiliates promoting the product had a solid reputation, and history in this field due to the higher price point than normal on a CB product ... and the potential for fraud. CB didn't want to be on the hook to pay fraudster affiliates a 50% cut on a $500 product.

Gary Ambrose

Very nice suggestion. The truth if you ask me is that it is primarily with internet marketing ebooks where majority of the theft takes place.

I don't think it will cross the mind of a mom buying an ebook on cooking to want to change the affiliate link. The truth is that she does not know it exist!

I think the word theft is being banalized here. Let's be frank, no one is jumping on you with a gun and demanding to get your money.

While the possibility of losing commissions angers me (and everyone else) I wouldn't call it theft as it smells of self-righteousness. The buyer owes we nothing and if they buy through our link it is an act of politeness not obligation.

Most of you will not agree with me (personal pet peeve) but I think that words like theft, cheat and fraud have to be used for the real deal and nothing in stuff like buying a product through one's own hoplink out of greed.

I purchased my own affiliate centre last year, and use it for my main site. I also manually approve affiliates, and it's proved to be worthwhile because I only have affiliates with targeted sites.

The affiliate centre also requires that I manually approve affiliate payments, and while at first I thought it was a pain, I do believe it's worthwhile.



Cheryl

As a newbie and a consumer affilates/owners/promoters have some ethic problems too. Example I'm on a list that sent me a product promtion. Wanting to get some reviews I "Googled" it and surprise, suprise I found a page where that same marketer was selling the same product for less than what he was charging me, "his valued subscriber" for.
Stuff happens.
You get what you expect and if you expect to get robbed you probably will.
-Lyn

I believe this feature would help power merchants who can hook power affiliates. But I reckon it'd be counter productive for the small guy who publishes an ebook that's promoted by small affiliates by writing a post on their respective humble blogs and get, at the most, a dozen sales. No affiliate would be bother to apply for a small product.

If the problem is to avoid people buying a product with their own affiliate link, why not simply freeze commissions generated by that product until you've made at least two sales? That why you'd gain nothing if you only sell one copy (your own purchase), while genuine affiliates who will surely sell more that 1 copy per product won't be affected.

Oh, and the other issue I see with Clickbank is that vendors can change the commission on their products any time they like.

I put a lot of work into promoting a $20 ebook that paid 50%. When the commisions came through I received $1-25. I contacted the product owner and he said he'd reduced the commission because he wanted to get more out of the sales. Too bad about his affiiliates.

Yes, he said as much in his email to me. He wasn't concerned about affiliates at all, only what he would recieve.

This attitude made me immediately stop promoting all his products. Since it was aimed specifically at writers, and I own one of the biggest writing websites on the net, he potentially lost a lot of sales/money.

From my perspective, my affiliates are my life-line. They bring in loads of sales, and they are treated accordingly. I NEVER knowingly do anything to upset my affiliates, because without them my income is reduced.



Cheryl

Yep, Click Bank has some minor issues that they should take care of.

I think something new is happening, over the last 2 day my orderform impressions have stayed the same but I'm only getting 1 sale per 60 orderform views.

Is this some new thing? it didn't happen like this before and as they are clicking the buy button and some sales are getting through I'm confused.

Any ideas?

Harvey can verify this for me but I remember a time a few years ago when
Easy Click Mate had this option. That was one of the features that I liked about it.

Next, CB came a long and made it against their policy. This caused Adrian to have to
revise the script. I still have the old version running and never upgraded dispite all
the other changes that were added.


I knew this would go full circle and will I only update my ECM when the
time is right! (ie, they revert back to their senses!)

Have a Great Day!
Michael

I'm waiting for this feature since 2003 and even posted it in a thread in the old Warrior Forum - here's the post:
Then in the ClickBank's survey, in 2005/06/02, I asked exactly the same and even gave the URL to that post.

I really hope ClickBank implements this feature once for all and that we don't have to wait another 6 years for it

And now that is seems they are in beta testing to implement this feature, I hope this can be used on a product basis and not for the whole account - they could have the following options:

What affiliates can promote this product?
1. Any affiliate;
2. Only the affiliates in the following list:[list of affiliates]

And for those that think this is a bad idea, think twice... once you have a ClickBank product to sell to IMers and some people just don't promote it because it's being sold via ClickBank, you'll be sorry about not having this option.

And I agree with Allen and always thought the same - they are loosing money due to this.

Carlos


P.S. 2 of the other features that I suggested in the ClickBank survey, in 2005, but AFAIK none of them are implemented (although I can live without them) were:

- Ability to configure commissions for each product and to specify commissions in percentage or amount of money.

- Ability to give different commissions to affiliates, per product. Just have a default commission value for the product and if we want to give higher commissions to some affiliates we would just have to enter their affiliate IDs and the commission value into a field.