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ClickBank and PayPal evaluation. By Bo Ekvall |
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Written by Bo Ekvall
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Tuesday, 18 April 2006 |
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 If you are going to sell products/services you need some alternatives for your customers paying you. Your own merchant account via your bank or other institution has always been very expensive for us small marketers.
When I started 1997 I could only take cash sending with postal mail as payment for my ezine advertising. As living outside USA I could not even take checks as it is very expensive and complicated to cash a foreign check in my country. So you can image that I did not make lot's of sales. :-) Thinking of it now, I admire the confidence people had sending cash by postal mail to the other side of the world without knowing anything about me.
1997 seems as middle age now and paying for service by sending cash or checks was not so uncommon. Then I discovered ClickBank, and later PayPal, and I could finally make the sales and my customers easy pay for it. I work only with ClickBank and PayPal. Neither of them are complete but together they cover my needs. There is many other similar merchant solutions but before you decide, think carefully what you need and also think of that if you split up your earning on many providers you will get smaller checks from each of them. That can be a problem if you live outside USA.
CLICKBANK
ClickBank is the provider for you if you have a service/product you want to sell using an affiliate program. It is of course much more powerful to have 100's or maybe 1000's of people out there with your links on their websites, selling your product. Even if you give 50% of the price in commission you would maybe not make that sale at all if it was not for the affiliate link.
A great advantage with ClickBank affiliate system is that ClickBank takes care of everything. They split automatically all sales coming from affiliate links in 2 parts, if commission is set to 50%. They send commission checks to the affiliates. Yes, you don't even KNOW your affiliates. You will be listed in their huge vendor directory (the more sales, the higher listed) and anybody who find you can put your link on their webpages and earn commission.
You can set the commission you want to pay from 5% up to 75%. ClickBank will send checks to you every 2 weeks and you can set yourself the minimum amount to send. If you want, they send as low as $10. You can also have ClickBank to wire your commission directly to you bank account. It also works outside USA as I do that.
ClickBank does not have a subscription system so it does not fit if you sell subscription service, as webhosting fees, paid membership sites etc.
ClickBank charge NO activation fee for your merchant account. For every transaction/sale they charge $1.00 + 7,5%.
If making money through affiliates is what you want, ClickBank is for you.
Click here to read more details about ClickBank
PAYPAL
PayPal have a different system. They do not offer a affiliate system but is cheaper for you if you only sell products/services yourself. Or as a complement to customers who want to pay with PayPal.
On the other hand they offer a subscription service. Ideal for you who sell webhosting, membership etc. Easy to create a subscription link and then PayPal will charge the customer for the periods you decide, until you or your customer cancel.
There is some disadvantage though. PayPal is not available in whole world and they do not send checks. The only way to get your money is that you live in some of the countries listed and approved by PayPal and that you give them your credit card information and bank account. But if you live in one of the approved countries and get verified, that is register your credit card and bank information, it's very easy and cheap to transfer your PayPal funds directly to your bank account.
Note that you can receive and send money even if you live in a country not on PayPal list. You can not get the cash but you can use your funds to pay for. For a long time before my country was approved, I used my funds to pay for my advertising campaigns.
Even today I prefer buy service via PayPal. I don't need to have my credit card information on many locations and I can easy cancel any time I want. I am paying subscription fees via PayPal programs I am working with.
WARNING!
You may have heard some horror stories about frozen PayPal accounts. Read the rules VERY CAREFULLY and don't keep lot's of money on your PayPal account! They don't accept payment for chainletters, pyramid programs, commission from membership in several levels etc. My PayPal account was frozen for one month in 2005 because I was promoting a safelist enrolling members in multiple level system. The fact that it was not any money involved and that the domain I used was NOT registered with PayPal did not matter and it took me lot's of work and time to find out what I had done wrong. I think the problem was that the structure of the safelist system was illustrated using a pyramid picture.
Well, when I removed the links to that webpage, they opened my account again.
Stormpay is no longer an alternative for the above payment transaction types. In March 2006 them changed their policy and are now accepting payments for their auction sales ONLY! You can not pay for service and subscription via Stormpay anymore.
As the information they gave was only a small notice on their webpage, only to be found if you scrolled down, the result is that many vendors using Stormpay does not know the new policy. You can still find Stormpay links on many sites but if you try to pay using the link, you will get an error message! I guess many of those vendors, who only worked with Stormpay, wonder what happened with their sales!!!
CUSTOMER SERVICE!
ClickBank. Outstanding!
PayPal. Very bad.
Stormpay. Even worse.
There is a number of other simple payment processors on the Internet but the above 3 is the only I have personal experience of.
To open a PayPal account is free and sales costs are lower than ClickBank.
Click here for info about PayPal.
Bo Ekvall (AKA MAM-BO) is the owner of
http://www.partenon.com
http://www.2bucks-an-ad.com
http://www.candidnetwork.com
http://www.powerofpartnership.com
http://www.candidclub.net
http://www.ytib.biz , |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 15 September 2006 )
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