On September 23rd 2015, Clickbank decided to implement an intrusive header on all pages generated by their affiliates.

On September 24th 2015, they decided to un-implement it due to the amount of negative publicity it was getting.

In the process, I think they’ve lost a lot of trust in the affiliate marketing arena.

First, a bit of history

Clickbank started in 1998.

At that stage, it was difficult for small vendors to get approved by credit card companies to accept payments.

The internet was new, security was lax (my eBay password at the time was just 4 characters long) and trust was low.

Clickbank helped small vendors accept credit cards.

Their stance has always been that they are a wholesaler and that they buy the (usually digital) products at a wholesale price and then charge the customer a retail price.

I’ve never quite bought into that description – yes, every other wholesaler I’ve dealt with has bought stock but usually for rather more than $1 plus a percentage of the retail price – and have always thought that it was a ruse to get around the fact that credit card companies don’t like “third party processing”.

Third party processing is where someone with a credit card merchant account accepts payments on behalf of someone who hasn’t got a merchant account (maybe because they haven’t applied for one, maybe because they can’t get one, or maybe another reason).

Credit card companies are naturally suspicious – they’re dealing with money after all – and are not keen on that arrangement. Often their agreements specifically state that the merchant can’t do that kind of thing.

Anyway, Clickbank managed to do this and a lot of small vendors – myself included – were happy with the arrangement.

For a fee, we could add a product to Clickbank’s marketplace, offer a percentage of the price to affiliates, give a fee to Clickbank (sorry, I meant to say sell the product to Clickbank at a wholesale price) and pocket the difference.

While there was next to no competition, that worked quite well.

But times changed

PayPal started not long after Clickbank and gradually started to become a major force in the business of letting small companies and individuals transfer money to each other.

Other marketplaces started to appear.

Then, much more recently, other credit card options such as Stripe started to appear.

Suddenly vendors and affiliates had a choice.

Clickbank’s reaction has been odd at times.

They’ve always had chargebacks – that’s in the nature of the credit card acceptance business.

Clickbank’s problem in this respect has always been brand awareness.

Most customers don’t really realise that they’re dealing with this “retailer”.

They buy a product on, say, dealing with Crohn’s disease or some pre-written sermons or French lessons or whatever else.

Then a month later they get a seemingly unrelated item on their credit card statement from a company they don’t recognise – Clickbank/Keynetics or something similar.

They don’t relate that to the product they downloaded, glanced at and then left on their hard drive.

So they contact their credit card company and dispute the payment.

Some of that can be handled at the point of sale – download pages are supposed to mention it.

But let’s face it, most of us are keener to find the bit that says “download” than the small print that says what will appear on a credit card statement.

And a month later we won’t remember anyway.

So a simple email reminder a few days or even a few weeks after the purchase wouldn’t go amiss. And it’s easy enough to program that to happen, even if a lot of the messages would likely end up in the junk folder.

Instead, Clickbank thought it would be a bright idea to splatter their branding all over the sales pages.

They did this in a non-search engine friendly way: they used an early technique called framing.

So the URL in the address bar bore no relation to the one you’d clicked on or the product you were looking at.

On top of that, the header was leaky.

It had links to customer service – why would you want that when you hadn’t even bought yet – and the Clickbank marketplace.

That second link wasn’t in the initial mockup that was shown on Clickbank. They sneaked it in on the launch day.

And – importantly for affiliates and vendors – it cut them out of the equation if the visitor made any purchase other than one from the intial site.

Vendors and affiliates aren’t fans of that!

It takes a lot of hard work and effort to get people to a sales page.

If you’re running ads, it costs money as well.

So anything that you don’t control that takes a visitor away from your site is unwelcome. Especially if there’s no monetary compensation.

You’d think that a company who’s been around for as long as Clickbank would instinctively realise that.

But you’d be wrong.

They adopted a cavalier attitude of “we’re right, you’re wrong”.

Then backtracked when the subsequent uproar happened.

They also tried re-writing history

Re-writing history can work.

But not when it’s so fresh in people’s minds that it only happened a day or two ago!

Their initial email about the swap said:

“ClickBank product vendors are now required to include a small JavaScript code on all pages within their marketing funnel. “

It also stated:

“we are actively testing several variations of the Always On Shopping Portal to remove impact on conversions. “

When the furore happened, they then claimed it was only a test:

“Our testing with the iframe to extend brand recognition has been concluded. The vendor pitch pages that were included in the test will no longer show in an iframe for hop traffic.”

Even though nothing in the original message had suggested that and everything pointed to it being a final decision with just a bit of tweaking to make sure it didn’t adversely affect conversions.

It all comes down to trust

Trust is fragile.

Telling lies doesn’t help build trust.

Implementing something major without some serious testing and without consideration for its impact doesn’t build trust.

To their credit, Clickbank did perform a quick U-turn.

But that still doesn’t help the sour taste it’s left in people’s mouths.

For me, it means I’m moving my remaining products away from Clickbank.

If they can try this once, they can try it again. And I don’t want to be caught up in the hassle.

Again for me, I’m also reducing the amount of Clickbank products I promote.

That will take longer as it’s still one of the bigger marketplaces on the web for affiliates to find products.

But it’s not the only one and I’ll be looking around and reporting here and also to my Affiliate Marketing Road Map clients.

My initial thoughts are likely to be to check JVZoo but they aren’t the only option. And it could well be that different markets have different solutions. And new ones will emerge.

Time will tell.

But memories of this kind of fiasco tend to be quite long and I think the damage Clickbank have done to their own reputation will be hard to undo.

As always, your thoughts are welcome in the comments box below.