Clickbank fees are eating us alive! Alternatives for low priced items?

[Michael Kellam]

Hi everyone!

Many of our products are lower priced products, or become lower priced products temporarily if we have a sale. We currently use Clickbank for our affiliate program but on sales of lower priced products, Clickbank fees (~23%) seem outrageous.

We'd like to use something other than Clickbank for these low price sales to keep more money for ourselves and our affiliates. (We would easily save thousands of dollars a year and I also believe we'd have happier affiliates if they ended up with more money from the sales, resulting in many more sales.)

We're currently using Easy Clickmate to manage our Clickbank program and it just occurred to me that I should check to see something inside Easy Clickmate would allow us to pass some orders through Clickbank and others somewhere else. I'd like to avoid a "dual" system because I'd like to make sure affiliates get a commission for ALL sales resulting from their referral, but I don't feel like we're getting the benefit we're paying for when we use Clickbank for these orders.

Most of our affiliates did not come from the Clickbank Marketplace, so the 23% fee is really just for payment processing...

Any suggestions how to handle this, anyone? Am I crazy?

Thanks!

Michael


P.S. Here's an example why it's bugging me. Many of our products are lower priced. We have a product that sometimes sells for $6.48. Clickbank fees are $1.00 plus a percentage of the sale. In this case, they take $1.50 per $6.48 order and then we split $4.98 with the affiliate (50% commission), which works out to $2.49 each.

For this product, the Clickbank fees alone amount to 23% of the sale, so we and the affiliate are only really getting 38% each.

If we sold the e-book directly using Paypal, the fee would be only 7.5% (or .49) for this transaction, 1/3 of the Clickbank fee.

My issue is that after paying "fees" of 23% or more and then the overhead in producing the e-books, operating the site taxes, etc. it feels like we're not really making money on low priced items, but that's what our (frugal living) group buys the most...

[PamBrechlin]

I am currently setting up an affiliate program using amember and taking paypal payments. Maybe this would work for you!

[Michael Kellam]

Hi Pam,

Let me know how it goes...

Thanks!

Michael

[ChristineCobb]

I think you will have to go to a dual system if you want to pay affiliates. You could look at Digital Access Pass where the higher priced products go through Clickbank and the lower priced products use PayPal and the DAP system for affiliate payments.

[MaryB2010]

What about Sid Hale's Rapid Action Profits program? He was a NAMS4 instructor and was talking about his RAP program, but because I didn't have my own info product yet it wasn't something I looked into at the time.

[Michael Kellam]

I think you will have to go to a dual system if you want to pay affiliates. You could look at Digital Access Pass where the higher priced products go through Clickbank and the lower priced products use PayPal and the DAP system for affiliate payments.

Thanks, Chris! Do you have any experience with this kind of model? My only concern with a dual system is that I want to make sure affiliates get paid for all the sales they refer. In other words, if they had a Clickbank cookie, would they not get a commission of the referral buys a non-clickbank item?

Do you know, if we integrate DAP, can it track referrals so affiliates get credit whether the person they refer buys the higher priced item through Clickbank or the lower priced item through DAP/Paypal? If so, that might be a very good solution for us...

An added bonus is the built in autoresponder/newsletter option. We've been having trouble with Aweber dropping people off our newsletter list who keep asking to be re-added but who Aweber won't re-add because they are having trouble with some ISPs. This might provide a way to be able to send newsletters to the "raving fans" who have been dropped and prevent unnecessary shrinkage in our list...

Thanks!
Michael

[Michael Kellam]

What about Sid Hale's Rapid Action Profits program? He was a NAMS4 instructor and was talking about his RAP program, but because I didn't have my own info product yet it wasn't something I looked into at the time.

Hi Mary,
Thanks for the suggestion. I looked at it a little but realize I need to take a closer look to fully understand it. I would like, if possible to use a solution that could somehow allow us to use Clickbank for the bigger items so we could still try to reach affiliates in the Marketplace but would allow tracking for affiliates so regardless whether the people they refer buy one of our Cilickbank products or one of our inexpensive products, they still get paid. Thanks again for the suggestion!
Michael

[ChristineCobb]

Thanks, Chris! Do you have any experience with this kind of model? My only concern with a dual system is that I want to make sure affiliates get paid for all the sales they refer. In other words, if they had a Clickbank cookie, would they not get a commission of the referral buys a non-clickbank item?

Do you know, if we integrate DAP, can it track referrals so affiliates get credit whether the person they refer buys the higher priced item through Clickbank or the lower priced item through DAP/Paypal? If so, that might be a very good solution for us...

An added bonus is the built in autoresponder/newsletter option. We've been having trouble with Aweber dropping people off our newsletter list who keep asking to be re-added but who Aweber won't re-add because they are having trouble with some ISPs. This might provide a way to be able to send newsletters to the "raving fans" who have been dropped and prevent unnecessary shrinkage in our list...

Thanks!
Michael

DAP will track anyone who comes through the system. Unlike Clickbank they are tagged for life to the affiliate. My suggestion is to pose your question to Ravi & Veena at DAP. They are very responsive and can probably give you some pointers that will solve your issues. DAP also has a built in autoresponder that uses your own server, however I would only use it for smaller subsets of your list to keep the size manageable for your host.

[Michael Kellam]

Thanks you, Chris. This sounds like it will do what we want. I will ask my specific questions to Ravi & Veena at DAP, but it sounds like the direction we'll probably go. Thanks again!

Michael

[KristenEckstein]

Michael - I've been using DAP for the past year, integrated directly with my Authorize.net account (regular merchant account) and PayPal. We started out using ClickBank, but for the same reason we left. DAP does tag people for life, which is great, but you have to watch if you make a sale directly (say admission to a live event) that had nothing to do with the affiliate, you have to go in & manually remove that commission. Other than that, DAP has been wonderful. It generates a report with one click that you copy/paste into PayPal to send a mass payment. Major time saver!

[Michael Kellam]

Thanks Kristen!

It's good to get details from you since you're actually using it. I imagine the tagging people for life is popular with the affiliates! The mass payment option sounds great... I was wondering how we would handle payments but that sounds easy.

Thanks again!

Michael

[Jack Born]

Another option is to do a post purchase upsell in your ClickBank account. It's not appropriate in all markets or situations but if you're getting good volume with ClickBank you might consider ways to increase your value per visitor. Adding an immediate upsell option is one way.

[Michael Kellam]

Hi Jack,
Thanks! We do intend to add an upsell option once we 're sure how we're going to reorganize our system. We're also trying to figure out hoe to add our physical products to our affiliate program, but it might not work with the Clickbank fees, either... I've seen their "make it a free bonus item" option, but don't think that would be god for us, should we add our physical products.

Thanks again!

Michael

[BobTheTeacher]

I've used DAP quite a bit, directly connected to Paypal. Love it.

Kristen - you can set individual commission rates, including 0, for any product that you are selling. So you can have 100% on your lead gen, 33% on an upsell, and 0 on the big ticket coaching; or whatever combination you prefer. Just be clear with affiliates what they get credit for.

Another HUGE reason I love DAP above other systems: EVERY member, free (optional) or paid, is instantly an affiliate and can have their affiliate link sent to them immediately and posted on every Wordpress page in your members area.

Bob

[BobTheTeacher]

Oh, and for more DAP discussion of benefits, etc., check out my site, DiscoverDAP.com - specifically this post: Top 10 Reasons To Build Your Membership Site With Digital Access Pass And WordPress (http://discoverdap.com/profits/top-10-reasons)

[Michael Kellam]

Thanks for the info on DAP. We bought it and do intend to implement it soon. I wanted to implement it before our current print book sale so we could point affiliates to that sale, but ran into a few technical snags. It conflicted with our W3TotalCache plugin, which has dramatically improved our site load speed, but that's apparently part of the way DAP is designed to work. Caching is not a good idea for membership sites but our use of DAP would not be for a membership site. We only need it to track affiliates and control downloads to customers.
I assume that you don't use caching. Is that correct?
Michael

[ChristineCobb]

I don't use a caching plugin. You could create a related site for DAP and then link to it from your main site. DAP affiliate links can include pages on other domains. You might be able to have another Wordpress install in another directory on your site where the DAP pages would be. I'm not sure if the cache plugin would still be a problem even if the second install would not have it.

[Michael Kellam]

Yes, I was thinking about whether or not it would be too much maintenance to have a separate Wordpress install in a /store/ directory with all of our products in it and all sales transactions happen there. Then I could keep caching on the main site and only use DAP for the store and to protect downloads.
One possible advantage would be that not all plugins would have to run on both installs, so there would be potentially less conflicts between plugins and not loading all plugins on the main site might make it load faster, too...
I'm going to test the speed difference with no caching and then make the call...
Thanks again!
Michael