ClickBank is the oldest digital-product marketplace still running, and the one where the affiliate commission on a $47 ebook could be 75%. I listed there years ago, alongside JVZoo and a couple of others, because I'd read that the marketplace would bring me affiliates for free. It didn't. Nothing I've seen since has changed my view that a marketplace amplifies a program that's already working and does nothing for one that isn't.
Two opinions up front, labelled as opinions. First: ClickBank's marketplace is full of schemey health-adjacent products, the kind where the disclaimer at the bottom of the page contradicts the sales page above it, and where the person in the lab coat on the video isn't a doctor. Vendors have been running that play there for years, and the platform has tolerated it for years. Second: I suspect ClickBank has lost market share. I don't see people in my corner of the industry using it the way they did a decade ago. That's an observation from my own feeds and inbox, not a number, and I couldn't find a public figure either way. Treat it as a suspicion.
The rest of this is from ClickBank's help centre, its client contract, and reviews on Capterra and ConsumerAffairs. Third-party claims are marked.
The history
ClickBank started in 1998, the same year as CJ and LinkShare, out of Boise, Idaho, as a way for anyone to sell a downloadable product and pay affiliates without a merchant account. The legal entity is still Click Sales Inc., still Boise. The founding idea was the clever part and it's still the product: ClickBank isn't a payment processor sitting between you and your buyer, it's the retailer. The customer buys from ClickBank. ClickBank sets the final retail price, owns the checkout, handles sales tax and VAT in every country, pays the affiliate, pays you, and decides the refund. You're a supplier.
That model is why a 2004-era marketer with a Word document and a PayPal account could run a global business with a 75% affiliate payout. It's also why the marketplace filled up with what it filled up with. When the retailer takes every product and the affiliates chase the highest payout, you get Gresham's law, the sixteenth-century observation that bad money drives out good. Products engineered for commission and conversion crowd out products engineered to be good, because the affiliates (rationally) promote the former. ClickBank's own history is that principle playing out over twenty-five years.
Who it's for
Sellers of digital products and supplements who want a merchant of record to handle checkout, global tax, affiliate payouts and 1099s, and who have an affiliate base already, or a plan to build one that doesn't rely on the marketplace.
Launch-style info-product sellers whose affiliates already live on ClickBank and ask for a HopLink. If your JV partners want ClickBank, you go where the partners are.
Who should skip it
Anyone whose brand would be hurt by the neighbours. Your product page sits in a marketplace beside the things I described above, and your affiliates will be the people who promote those things.
Anyone selling to a normal audience. Parents, photographers, B2B. Your buyers don't know what ClickBank is and your affiliates aren't there. Same advice I give for JVZoo.
Anyone who needs to own the refund decision. ClickBank's policy is 60 days, no questions, at ClickBank's discretion, and the contract lets it reverse a sale "for any other reason ClickBank deems appropriate."
Anyone who expects the marketplace to recruit for them. See the opening paragraph.
From the affiliate side
I've never pushed ClickBank products as an affiliate, so I've got nothing first-hand here. What I can tell you from the vendor side is that the affiliates who found my listing weren't the ones I wanted, and the ones I wanted weren't looking at listings.
Pricing, decoded
- Activation: $49.95, one-time, charged when your first product is approved.
- Per sale: 7.5% plus $1. ClickBank buys your product from you at 92.5% of the retail price minus a dollar. Rebills under $40 are 9.9%.
- Per payment: $5 by direct deposit or cheque, $45 by wire.
- Refunds: $0.50 to $1 each.
- Chargebacks: $22 if your rate is under 1%, $29 plus the margin at 1% to 1.49%, $49 plus the margin above 1.5%.
- Dormant account fees: $1 per pay period after 90 days without a sale, $5 after 180, $50 after 365. This one drains a balance to zero. Who does that? CJ, and now you know of two.
Now the worked example, because the headline rate isn't the cost. A $100 product, 50% affiliate commission.
ClickBank takes $8.50. The $91.50 left is split with the affiliate, so you're owed $45.75. ClickBank holds 10% of that for twelve weeks as a return allowance, so $41.18 is payable. Subtract $5 for the payment. $36.18 hits your bank, and only after you've cleared the Customer Distribution Requirement: five sales from at least two different payment methods, then a two-week wait. So on a $100 sale where you pay 50% commission, your first-quarter cash is about 36% of the retail price, and your first cheque is a month or more away.
That's before refunds, which ClickBank grants at its discretion for 60 days and sellers can request up to 365, and before the contract's section 4e, which lets ClickBank withhold any portion of your balance in its sole discretion. The 10% allowance is also adjustable, upward, at ClickBank's discretion.
Twice-weekly payouts exist, for "qualifying clients," through an account manager. Everyone else is weekly or bi-weekly on Fridays, with a $100 default threshold.
What it does well
Merchant of record, done at scale. ClickBank collects and remits sales tax and VAT globally, pays every affiliate, and issues the 1099s to affiliates over $600. If you're a solo vendor selling into forty countries, that's a real service and nobody in the self-serve software bracket does it.
Affiliates get paid by ClickBank, not by you. There's no commission run, no PayPal mass pay, no "did you send my cheque" email. The affiliate's trust is in ClickBank, which for an unknown vendor is a feature.
JV contracts, up to five parties. Like JVZoo, one sale splits automatically between partners at the moment of purchase. The affiliate-referral JV is the closest thing to a second tier.
Longevity. Twenty-eight years, same entity, same city. Whatever else you say about it, the cheques have been clearing since the Clinton administration.
Lock-in: 4 out of 5
What gets you out: transaction reports export, and the INS webhook gives you buyer name, email, phone and address at the moment of sale as an independent data controller, which is better than Digistore24 documents. No term contract.
What keeps you in: ClickBank owns the checkout, the price, the refund decision and the customer relationship. Section 5d of the contract restricts what you can do with the buyer data you've been given. There's a 10% reserve on a twelve-week trail, so the money follows you out slowly. Every HopLink in the wild points at ClickBank, so leaving breaks every affiliate link at once. And ClickBank can delist a product "without cause or notice," which is a form of lock-in in reverse: you can be removed faster than you can leave.
Four. The retailer model is the lock.
Gotchas
- Your first-quarter cash is around a third of retail at 50% commission once the fee, the 10% reserve and the $5 payment fee are taken. Model it before you set the price.
- ClickBank decides refunds. 60 days, no questions, at its discretion, plus a catch-all reversal clause.
- Dormant fees eat small balances. $1, then $5, then $50 per pay period. A product that stops selling becomes a product that costs money.
- Five sales from two payment methods before the first payment. A launch that sells ten copies by credit card alone hasn't cleared it.
- Chargeback fees escalate with your rate. Above 1.5% you're paying $49 plus margin per dispute.
- Section 4e. ClickBank "may withhold any portion" of your balance at its sole discretion. It's in the contract you'll click through.
- Buyer-data use is restricted by section 5d, even though you receive the data.
- Delisting without cause or notice is in the contract.
- No PayPal payouts to vendors. Direct deposit, wire, Payoneer, cheque.
- The marketplace won't recruit for you. Visibility perks are gated on existing sales. "Amplify, don't acquire" is the whole platform.
- The neighbours. My opinion, but one I'll stand behind: the health and supplement side of the marketplace is where the contradicting-disclaimer sales page lives. Your product sits next to it.
Integrations
Instant Notification Service webhook for buyer data, reporting exports, and connectors through Zapier and ClickFunnels. Everflow has a native ClickBank integration if you're tracking at that level.
Not supported: your own checkout. That's the model. No Stripe, no Shopify, no PayPal payout.
If you're leaving
Pull every transaction report first, because the trailing reserve means ClickBank will still owe you money for twelve weeks after your last sale and you want your own record of it. Export the buyer data you're entitled to under the contract, and read 5d before you email any of it. Build the new checkout and affiliate program before you delist, then email every affiliate their new link the day you switch, because every HopLink dies at once. Expect the dormant fees to start ninety days after your last sale if you leave the account open with a balance; close it, or withdraw to zero.
Verdict
My opinion, labelled as such: ClickBank is a merchant of record with a marketplace attached, and the marketplace is the part people buy it for and the part that doesn't do what they think. If your affiliates already ask for HopLinks and your product is comfortable in that company, ClickBank handles tax, payouts and 1099s better than anything you'd assemble yourself, and the 7.5% plus a dollar is a fair price for that. Budget for the reserve and the first-payment delay, and read 4e.
If you're there for free affiliates, you're going to be disappointed, as I was. And if the thought of your product beside a fake doctor bothers you, that's your answer.
For launch-style products sold to marketers, JVZoo and WarriorPlus keep the money in your own Stripe or PayPal and give you the buyer outright. For a digital product sold to a normal audience, run your own checkout and your own affiliate program: Lemon Squeezy if you want a merchant of record without the marketplace, or Systeme.io if you want the funnel, the email list and the affiliate program in one place for less than ClickBank's activation fee a month. Either way, the affiliates you want will come from your audience, not from a listing.
Last verified November 2, 2026. Fees, payout rules, Customer Distribution Requirement and return allowance from the ClickBank help centre. Contract clauses from the ClickBank client contract. Founding and corporate details are third-party. Reviews referenced from Capterra (4.3/5, 19) and ConsumerAffairs (1.0/5, mostly buyers). Opinions on marketplace quality and market share are the author's own and unverified. The author listed products on ClickBank as a vendor years ago and has not promoted ClickBank products as an affiliate. Some links on this page are affiliate links.
