Last week I went to London for a gathering with ClickBank. The meeting was put together by Harvey Segal from the ClickBankSuccessForum and four top ClickBank executives from the US. There were about 30 people in attendance and two people from the US, including myself.
In attendance from ClickBank were CEO Bob King, CTO Monty Sooter, Vice President of Business Development Dush Ramachandran, and Director of Marketing Bob Dunlap.
Bob King spoke at the event. He is the ClickBank CEO, and actually just stepped into the role about a year and a half ago. He has a very successful track record as CEO of other large corporations and is very excited about what’s in store for ClickBank.
A little history about ClickBank…
ClickBank was founded by a single individual who developed and grew the business. About a year and a half ago Bob King stepped in and now it seems they have a new vision, direction, and plan for growth.
Currently ClickBank has about 100,000 active affiliates, 11,000 active publishers, and 20,000 completed orders daily. 70% of all sales are made by affiliates.
ClickBank as a company has no debt, is in good financial standing, and issued their first press release recently announcing their first million dollar day.
ClickBank makes most of their sales in the US, somewhat over 70%, about 13.2% in Western Europe, and about 5% in Australia.
Bob King mentioned the changes on the order forms that have been occurring lately. Apparently some of the text they have been placing on the form is there in order to be complaint with various state and federal laws. He also mentioned they are working very closely with the FTC. My suggestion is for those of you with websites in the legal gray area, you may want to make sure you clean them up to FTC standards. As for order form optimization it is done very carefully and any effects from their changes can be determined quickly and removed immediately if it’s determined to have any negative effect on sales.
ClickBank’s System…
Monty Sooter, ClickBank CTO was brought into ClickBank around the same time as the new CEO. He has been in charge of the server structure and overseeing the server upgrades and system changes lately.
Monty outlined their entire new system, and I must say it’s pretty impressive. They’ve rebuilt the entire structure in order for new growth with more redundant servers. They had a few bugs that were pretty much unavoidable, but I think the worst is behind them. I know there may be more bugs that may occur from time to time, but the good part is that they are on top of it and are striving to build a fast, responsive, and stable system. It looks like it’s mostly all done and from here on out should be very stable and reliable.
Monty also mentioned they have several uptime monitors in place, so they know the moment any part of the system fails so they can get it back online as soon as possible.
It was very reassuring to learn about the planning that is going on behind-the-scenes and that they really do know what they are doing.
Monty also mentioned their new supplemental hoplink tracking, so in case a cookie is removed or cannot be set they will still be able to track the referring affiliate.
The Good Stuff…
So what’s ahead for ClickBank?
Bob Dunlap had some terrific news as to what’s in store for ClickBank! One major breakthrough that I’ve been waiting for is recurring billing! It looks like they are going to have a simple recurring billing feature available within the next 60 days. I asked if this would include Paypal as a payment option and it looks like at first it will not, but eventually it will.
The recurring billing feature will offer a monthly recurring billing option with an option to choose a unique price for the first payment. It will have a new order form, and possibly an upgrade option for premium subscriptions.
What really impressed me is that every new development and release is well thought out, it’s done in small steps, and is planned in order to make sure they don’t ‘rock the boat’ so to speak. Most of what they mentioned was not yet set in stone and they may change a few features as they go along.
Some other improvements they are considering are additional analytics; I recommended they display the clicks that each hoplink receives based on TID. It sounds like they could report a variety of data, so I am looking forward to this.
They are looking at some multi-language and multi-currency payment options. Perhaps a Client API, which could mean great things for tracking and reporting!
A Few Random Notes…
The average refund rate across the board is about 7%. The limit for a refund rate before they will contact you about the issue is 15% however they start watching accounts that have a 10% refund rate or higher. Anyone with a chargeback rate higher than 1% will also be put on ‘probation’ so to speak.
Summary
A lot was covered, much more than I have time to share, but this I felt was the most important information. The biggest impact the conference had for me is that they are working on building relationships with their affiliates and vendors, they are being pro-active about improvements and changes, and they are willing to listen us.
All the attendees from ClickBank were very nice, down to Earth, and motivated to grow and improve the company. Look out for great things to come from them!
Miles, thanks for your enlightening report.
One question I can kick myself for not submitting to you: now that the refund deadline is 60 days, why is the reserve still at 90 days?
Some other affiliate networks I belong to don’t even have a reserve — so getting our 10% back 30 days sooner is highly desirable.
It also appears that they’re not quite out of the woods yet when it comes to technical problems, just yesterday there was downtime due to a power outage. I hope they plan to spend more money and effort on things like redundant servers and fail-over systems.
I’ll post more when I think of it. Thanks again for sharing!
- Doug