New Clickbank color coded risk tier accounts

Don't know if this is a good or bad thing, but they really could have done with a clean up a looooong time ago.

We have been warned too, but not due to any fault of ours.
Sometimes the ClickBank information doesn't make it to our download web site. A woman recently tried 4 times before I noticed, and I had to refund 3 of the purchase attempts to her.
Then a crook from Germany bought 5 of our products and asked for refunds on each, claiming they were the same as another he had bought. They weren't. He even threatened to sue ClickBank if they blocked him!
None of that activity reflects on our products or our services, but we are being penalized.
The good thing is, it isn't costing us anything yet - only if we get more refunds, then they will charge us more for the refund fees.
Our ClickBank sales have been going down every year, now less than half what they were a few years ago. Too bad.

I Got a "high risk" as an affiliate. Time to pack it in.

It's too late to improve the reputation of Clickbank. Give it a few years and they'll be scrambling to clean up the mess. By then it will be too late.

Im ditching them, and I'm certainly no "scammy vendor". Quite the opposite infact.

Ahh, I see what your saying. Thanks for the response, if that is the case then it does make sense.

LOL, interesting to see the customary range of Warrior opinion, not that anyone's specific activities/positions ever influence their perspectives, of course.

Still, never mind guys, at least you can agree on the fact that it's all ClickBank's fault, anyway. Never mind that PayPal, 2Checkout, Plimus and other processors are all encountering similar problems and situations caused by pressure from their upline financial service providers, and never mind that ClickBank's proposed solution looks rather more flexible, enterprising and realistic than most people's?

That's exactly the problem. Penalize the venders instead. Then maybe they'll stop making garbage.

The problem is that the vendors don't control the refund policy, Clickbank does. With every purchase a customer is sent an e-mail receipt with a customer service link. All they have to do is click a couple buttons and they will be instantly refunded without ever contacting the vendor.

I understand why they're doing this, but I do think the refund policy needs to be adjusted at least a little bit. For example, if you're giving customers 60 days to get a refund, why not also make it that they can't get a refund within the first seven days, or something like that.

I have an excellent pre-sell process in a desperate-buyer-niche, but I'm selling a $150 product. I've tried endless adjustments, but no matter what I do I cannot get rid of the few customers (around 10% in my experience) who will buy and then immediately refund within HOURS, just because they know they can. I never get refunds unless they are immediate. These aren't serial refunders, they're just folks who know that they can choose not to pay for a $150 product.

It looks like I'm either going to have to switch products for this niche or give up on it altogether, since it's the only one bringing up my refund rate beyond "acceptable" levels and if unchanged could cost me my account. A little frustrating, even if I can somewhat understand where they're coming from. Still, I can't help but think that if they would have filtered the hundreds of crap IM products a little more thoroughly that this whole thing could have been avoided.

Nope, if you are selling through Clickbank you have to abide by Clickbank's Return and Cancellation Policy, and can't state 'no refund' on your sales page.
ClickBank Client Contract - ClickBank
Return and Cancellation Policy - ClickBank

This change doesn't seem to have stopped or even slowed down new products being introduced in the clickbank marketplace, I see new products being added every day.

Thats because many products in the IM niche are crap.

Correct! I've been thinking on this. Frank Kern did the same with Mass Control and Jamie Lewis did it with Wealth in a Box.

Maybe they did it just because to save money from scammy refunders?

Lots of talk about chargeback but those only seem to happen if vendor thank you page doesn't communicate properly that they will see a charge from clickbank or provide customer support for processing refunds.

The Vendor refund fee though is pretty ridiculous.
(Product Retail Price X 7.5%) + $1.00

I'm BLUE but who knows how long that lasts. I stay away from IM niche though.

Yes, I agree.

If they are going to judge affiliates/vendors on their refunds, they need to be able to differentiate between "legitimate refunds" where the product was completely useless to the customer (and then disable/destroy it), and the cyber-crooks who just want a free product (meal).

Get an algorithm for that metric, and then you will be able to accurately judge the cause of the refund.

Charging people (refund fees) without positive proof of the cause of the refund, and just saying it must be because the vendor or affiliate did something wrong - is effing stupid - but profitable for CB.

Imagine if Walmart let you keep your product and get your money back too?

You want your money back, you need to return the product.

Try returning a DVD because the movie wasn't as good as the trailers you saw on TV...lol

I am sorry but CB knew the risk when they decided to become the "middleman" in online digital marketing...now they are bitching about it, and wanting to charge fees for unsubstantiated claims of bad business practices on the vendor/affiliates part.

I am not buying it.

It doesn't create a good customer experience though for the vast majority of honest customers - having to wait two whole months to get part of what they have paid for. This might result in more refunds.

I'd be interested in hearing some alternatives too, just in case I'm not aware of something new and awesome.

I think all high risk will be getting the chop come January so whether you are in that category or not, it's better to be safe than sorry and have a backup plan in place if you have a considerable income stream being generated through CB.

It appears the new risk assessment is a statistically-based algorithm for predicting future losses due to refunds based on metrics of previous transactions. For example, I currently promote over 300 Clickbank products with almost zero refunds, yet my affiliate risk tier is yellow. I have never been a vendor. This is most likely due to one or more at-risk niches and certainly nothing at all regarding my own marketing practices.

Yeah, that made me laugh. It always depends on your perspective.

The worst garbage is a "quality product." $500 out of $2500 refunded is "good". The unbelievable part of this - ClickBank has been allowing that to happen.

.

I'm doing even worse... See it all has to do with the niche of the products.. IM products are known for their high refund rates because customers just try them out, take the knowledge, and run! They just get their money back because that's the type of game people are playing as a newbie it seems :/ Sure there are a lot of scams out there, but too many people that buy IM products expect to get rich just by buying the product. I mean, what does CB expect with a 60-day, no-questions-asked refund policy?

It's the exact same thing, just different name. Clickbank decided to change the name of each colour tier for whatever reason.

You're missing the point completely. Refunds have ALWAYS been a factor. The main problem here is that CB now wants to CHARGE the vendor and affiliate (while still keeping their cut of the sale, by the way) for refunds and chargebacks. This is on top of their already high fees for vendors.

It's not about not getting the money from the sale..

It's about not getting the money from the sale AND being expected to have money taken from you because of it!

same here. 0 refunds/chargebacks for the entire life of this account (6 months) - moderate risk lol

Hm.. Why would PayPal do that? Don't they want clients who can pay them fees?

And besides that, a lot of well known high-earnings businesses use PayPal as a payment processor. :confused:

I read somewhere that they could close down personal accounts that received massive amounts of money. That's why I upgraded to a "Premier" account.

So you mean I'm still not safe?

It would be nice if some of us can come together and create our own affiliate network. A network for affiliates by affilaites. The very first thing would be to require every product to implement a simple program that checks whether the client has access rights or not by immediately accessing a database when a product is opened.

That's not true.

Clickbank stipulates quite clearly that refund terms must be displayed on the vendors sales page. It's one of the primary requirements.

If you aren't displaying refund terms you are violating CB terms.

^^ Does this show that digital (mostly IM/MMO) products stand a chance to get refunded even more than Snake Oil, given an auto-refund option, in which I am assuming that Snake Oil is a non-existent product - something that you only pay for but never receive?

^^ Good, Moderate Risk etc are all the same, think of these rated at 3 at a scale of 5.


Not that I have figured anything (and my affiliate account is blue like both the above - the second-best rating - and my refund rates are reasonably low - 4.55% over the past 12 months if I got the numbers right) - but their algorithm seems to be "too sophisticated" or close to random to me so far - not something that I have so far been able to make sense of.

By the way, any "excellent" rating so far?

That proves that a good amount of refunds are caused by cyber-crooks looking for a free product by asking for a refund even though they are happy with the product.

Before you can measure a vendors/affiliates performance on a refund metric you need to be able to weed out the people who are just plain stealing.

In my niche I get people asking all the time if the book is available in stores, why?

Because they can go there and read it while standing in the store for free, and there is a good possibility that it might be in a library.

I will guarantee at least half of my refunds are because people want something for nothing - that's why libraries are so popular.

I think the other half are from my vendor not answering customers emails in a timely manner - that is why I started my own form of customer support with a free forum.

Maybe this policy change will wake him up - I know there is nothing more I can do to stop refunds from my end.

I can understand what CB is trying to do, but just like Google they are going about it the wrong way.

These sophisticated algorithms are wrong more than they are right.

Plus, if they are "really" worried about losing their credit card processors because of too many refunds or charge backs - why the fees?

How is making money from people until you close their accounts going to save them from being shut down by their CC processors?

I would think you would just close their accounts and be done with it - it seems like they are more interested in making some extra money than they are about losing their CC processors.

Although I can see why Clickbank are keen to improve their quality and reputation (ie whoever runs their merchant account is probably the world's most highly-stressed individual) they are going about this the complete wrong way.

Here's why:

1) Beyond the affiliates who really over-hype a product and then generate refunds when the customer realizes they have been duped, affiliates don't have any control over the refund rate of a product. As an affiliate I cannot easily contact a customer to make sure everything is okay with the product. Some vendors may make it difficult to get refunds (ie send lots of obfuscating messages that try and skirt the refund problem) whereas others give away refunds like there's no tomorrow.

Example: I recently promoted a video game guide in a new niche. Made about $600 sales in a week. the VENDOR sent an email saying "hey guys, just remember if you aren't 100% happy you can get a full refund." Next thing you know, around 50% of those sales refunded. Now my account is chilling in the unacceptable category (but that is neither Playboy bunnies, nor classy honeys, because I am ditching CB altogether as we speak)

You cannot penalize affiliates for something they can't control, especially when CB has such a stupid refund policy.

2) The refund policy itself is totally whack. 95% of stuff on Clickbank is info-products. You can't "break" an info-product. You don't need 60 days to decide whether you want to return it (while still being able to keep it). In my ideal world, Clickbank would have a 48 hour MAX refund window for info products - maybe longer for software etc that could be buggy and then patched up. If you download an eBook, you can tell within a few minutes of reading/browsing whether you have paid for quality.

With 60 day refunds, even the most glacial of action takers can go through a course and then decide to refund for some nonsense excuse. I work for a company in my day job that publishes some top products on Clickbank, and the number of outrageous refund requests we get (including things like "hey I'm about to buy - where is the refund button again?" or messages saying "CANCEL" "F$£$ING CANCEL" etc for recurring billing)

Of course vendors should stop selling on the basis of refunds. However, there should be:

* The ability to challenge a refund request. If I go into my local electronics store an purchase a laptop, then decide a week later it's not for me, the store has the right to challenge my refund request (and that's considering NZ's very "pro consumer" laws). There should be an ability to reject refund requests.

* Serial refunders/CCs/Paypals linked to serial refunders need to be banned

* Product goes invalid/unusable after refund. That's why if you're selling info on CB put it in a members' area and cancel the member's subscription after they download. I would go as far as not allowing anything to be downloaded from the members area - you have to watch it live. eBooks are a bit trickier though.

Imagine if, when I go to return that laptop I bought a week ago, I said it was my right to keep it. And then I went and purchased 50 other items in the store and did the same. Now do you see the flaw with Clickbank?

3) Clickbank don't exactly check for quality. There are so many garbage products on there, often hidden behind slick sales pages. The IM niche is particularly nefarious for this. However, no niche escapes this fate. Historically, it has been in Clickbank's interest to accept any product that is not clear nonsense, because they earn from it. Quality control MUST be tightened if this silly color coded policy is to remain.

Of course it's all over but the crying, and here's why:

* Clickbank are probably looking to move to a new paradigm where only the big affiliates and product vendors survive. This has been mentioned by other champion minds in this thread before, but I will reiterate. When 5% of your people do 95% of your business, so many "headaches" could be reduced by simply cutting off the little guy.

* The refund policy won't change, because Clickbank will probably find itself getting speared by the FTC in record time.

* Clickbank has a long history of ignoring the requests and ideas of its affiliates and members.

* Clickbank has find a pretty crafty new way of profiting from their own terribly policies. They can now charge over-the-odds for refunds which are actually their own fault.

What can you, the humble Clickbanker do?

* Jump ship - start promoting physical products on Amazon etc where the refunds are much lower and conversions are higher.

* Look into alternatives. I'm liking JVZoo at the moment (I believe E. Brian Rose from these forums runs it? Kudos for such a cool platform if you're reading)

* Do WSOs for your IM products. At least Warriors tend to have a bit more of an idea that serial refunding isn't cool (seeing as we've all been stung by it in the past)

* Write angrily to Clickbank and withdraw your support.

* Start making YOUR OWN PRODUCTS. Sell them through your own delivery channels. Set your own terms. Find your own affiliates.