Clickbank Offers Recurring Billing

Today Clickbank announced their new service: recurring billing.

From the release summary, I learned the following.

The frequency is set to monthly only. Also every recurring billing product must go through the product approval process.

On payment failure Clickbank writes:

Unlike many of our competitors, we don’t give up after one payment failure. ClickBank understands that scheduled payments may fail for several reasons, including insufficient funds, so we have optimized our recurring billing process to reduce authorization declines and increase your revenue.

It’s not quite clear to me what they mean by that.

Also, Clickbank states that membership access and product delivery will be managed by the publishers and that recurring billing subscription may be canceled at any time.., but it’s not clear to me how a cancellation of the billing process is communicated to the publisher, so she can end the membership access. As far as I understand it, that should be done by hand, since there’s no vehicle like PayPal’s IPN.

What’s really odd is this rule:

If you are selling a recurring billing product, affiliates will earn commission for the initial payment and all additional rebill payments. The commission rate offered at the time of the initial payment remains the same for the rebills. Keep in mind that the initial payment must be equal or greater than the subsequent rebills.

That makes it impossible to offer free or low cost trial periods.
Strange.

All in all, lots of people will be happy with a bit of competition for PayPal.

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2007, June 19
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6 Responses to “Clickbank Offers Recurring Billing”

  1. Dave says:

    Case,

    Thank goodness I know how to add 3 plus 10 … I’m hoping that ClickBank adds a PayPal like IPN feature – will be much easier to get a script up and running that automates subscriber handling.

    Dave

  2. Case Stevens says:

    Hey Dave,
    That little calculation keeps the remote spammers away. :-)

    Yes, I think an IPN-like feature will be important to automatically handle subscribers and members.

    We’ll see what happens.

    Case

  3. SLL says:

    Recurring billing will be a great way to build a growing customer base. I hope Clickbank will will add an IPN feature soon

  4. MorganLighter says:

    Wow – thanks for the heads up. This will be so cool. Thanks again.

  5. Al (PaPaGrizz) Nelson says:

    IMO..clickbank as done the right thing, and has opened up a new market for all IMer’s

    PaPaGrizz

  6. Charlie says:

    I think that until they offer allow the free trial thing (as PayPal does) I will be sticking with PayPal. Also, the fees are quite high at 9.9% as opposed to PayPal’s 2.4-3.4% approx.

    The main problem is the lack of the ability to give free trials though. It is indeed weird why they did that.