I just started selling a product targetted at ClickBank sellers through PayDotCom. It doesn’t sell through ClickBank. That ’s nuts! Why don’t I sell it through ClickBank? I’ll start my comparison of ClickBank and PayDotCom there, but there’s more…

Product Approval

Every product that sells through ClickBank has to be submitted to them for review. They review the product, the sales page, the “thank you” page from which the product is downloaded, and, I discovered, even the members only area that buyers get access too.

One of their rules is that you can’t offer customers additional products for purchase once they’ve paid. That includes the download page and, unbelievably, your members only area. In short, that’s why my product isn’t selling through ClickBank — I wasn’t willing to remove a few informational pages from my members area that point to additional products.

So I went to PayDotCom. They don’t review your products, your sales pages, your download pages, your members area, or anything else, which makes getting started with them a lot easier.

Why the difference? I’m guessing that it’s because ClickBank handles payment processing and PayDotCom doesn’t (they just send the customer to your payment processor for you and provide tracking for affiliates). So while ClickBank has to deal with chargebacks, refund requests, etc. for payments made to their merchant accounts, PayDotCom doesn’t. Thus, PayDotCom isn’t as concerned about minimizing returns.

Ease of Setup

Both sites have their problems in this area. At ClickBank, there’s the problem of wrapping your brain around their braindead system where no matter how many products you sell through one account, all affiliate links to your products go to the same page. If you want to have multiple landing pages without having to do some extra coding and tell your affiliates how to link to specific products (which not all will do, since many will find your product through ClickBank’s marketplace rather than your site), you have to create and pay for multiple vendor accounts.

Beyond that, basic setup with ClickBank is reasonably straightforward and well documented. If you want to protect your download page, that takes little more work, but they show you how to do it.

PayDotCom’s documentation is incomplete, a few years old, and some of it is out of date. As much as I respect Mike Filsaime, I’ve found this to be typical of his websites — once they’re built, they don’t seem to be maintained as well as one might hope. Without going too far off on this tangent, I’ll just point out that the text on many of his sites contains grammatical errors and sentences that don’t sound like they were written by a native English speaker. But enough on that.

After tracking down the documentation and reading through it, despite it’s shortcomings, I didn’t find it difficult to get my product pages ready to work with PayDotCom.

Fees

PayDotCom claims to have significanly lower fees than ClickBank, and technically it’s true, because they do charge lower fees. However, they gloss over the fact that with them, you also have to pay PayPal fees. I suppose if you were selling using a personal PayPal account, you wouldn’t, but then you’d be severly limited in how many sales you could processes, so that’s not very realistic.

Here’s a graphic I’ve created that compares the fees you’ll pay when selling through PayDotCom versus ClickBank, along with differences in the commissions you’ll pay your affiliates, and your net profits.

The numbers down the left side are amounts in dollars, and the ticks along the bottom are for the price in dollars of your product, running from zero to sixty.

The first thing to note is the orange and blue lines — contrary to what PayDotCom would have you believe, unless your product is priced at $7-10 or over $50, assuming PayPal fees of 30 cents + 3%, you’ll pay more when selling through them than through ClickBank.

The second thing to note is the brown and yellow lines. Because PayDotCom calculates commissions before any fees are paid, but ClickBank calculates them after fees are deducted, with the same nominal commission rate of $40%, you’ll pay more fees to PayDotCom affiliates than ClickBank affiliates. If you’re the affiliate, this is good. If you’re the vendor, this is bad.

Combine the above points, and as you’ll see, the vendor’s net revenue is less when selling through PayDotCom than ClickBank. And the higher the commission percentage, the bigger the difference is.

But there’s a caveat — vendors can control how much their revenue share will be by setting the commission percentage lower, and if affiliates are looking at commission dollars rather than percentages, then at prices over $50, PayDotCom can be more attractive financially. But affiliates don’t only look at commission dollars when choosing products to promote and deciding how hard to promote — percentages matter.

But there’s another caveat — at PayDotCom, you can prepay your fees and save 20%. But since the maximum fee per transaction is $3.00, maximum savings per transaction is 60 cents, and that amount gets split between the vendor and the affiliate, so the difference it trivial.

But there’s another caveat — at PayDotCom, you don’t have to pay a setup fee to sell your first product. At ClickBank, there’s a one time fee of $49.95. So until you’ve paid $49 more in commissions to PayDotCom and PayPal, you’re better off at PayDotCom.

And there’s another caveat — at PayDotCom, there’s a one time $29 dollar fee if you sell more than one product per account. That’s not so bad, since it lets you sell unlimited products without additional setup fees. At ClickBank, you can sell more products without paying another setup fee, as long as you’re wiling to deal with the single landing page problem mentioned above. Otherwise, you’ll have to pay a fee for each account, though if you ask for it, you can get the fee reduced to $29.95 for your additional accounts.

One final gripe about ClickBank — when you first start selling through them, the maximum you can sell your products for is $50. After 8 weeks, you can request a limit increase, though you’re not guaranteed to get it. PayDotCom has no such limits. A problem ClickBank’s limit causes is that if you’re selling a product that’s worth much more than$50, you’ll either have to let it go cheap for a while, or find another product to sell for 8 weeks to establish your reputation with them before selling your higher priced product. That’s what I did with the product I started this post talking about.

And now, after two months of waiting, it won’t be selling through ClickBank anyway. Such is life.