I sent out an email to all our hundreds of affiliates requesting them to contact clickbank with a request to remove this form. As a vendor i see the negative damage this form has had in the few hours it is up. Anyone who is basing his income on clickbank should be concerned. i hope anyone reading this will contact with a firm request to remove the new order form! If you are either an affiliate or vendor at clickbank this change should concern you very much!. As a result of this move done by clickbank we now consider them an unstable platform and are searching for alternate sales processors to work with. I hope other vendors see this thread and contact clickbank. it is a big change and a very negative one!
Yeah, that's what I was thinking.. They could've atleast said, "If you are not happy/satisfied with the product...", and THEN mention the "Just ask for a refund" bit. Just like everyone else mentioned, they're pretty much asking you to get your money back, and saying, "hey, just order the product. you can come and get your money back right after". I don't know whether to laugh at how stupid this is, or be annoyed because it's going to affect me, and everyone else here in the long run (if it takes place of the old order form).
Let's take a second to remember that whatever CB are doing, they're doing with a view to boosting sales and improving profits for everyone. They don't make any money unless we do, so give them the benefit of the doubt. Split testing is a GOOD idea and helps to IMPROVE the bottom line. I'm sure they have very good metrics for measuring conversions and resulting refunds so they're not going to put up a page that performs worse than the old one.
Well if you are a vendor then you should check your emails from yesterday. we got x4 more refund requests then usual. some of them involved only a receipt id and the word "refund" as customers derived what they understand from the blunt order form. if you are not a vendor then trust me when i say it has horrible effect. if you are either an affiliate or a vendor you can always put that refund seal on your website should you decide to do so however clickbank has now involved itself in our marketing process without us as product owners having a say .
Well here I have seen a increase for now over 1 day, but this is spread out over 3 products, but refunds are higher then normal and I did not think anything until I saw this thread. This is not good if the cause is this split test, but let's hear from someone who is pushing a lot. CALLING NORB - CALLING DR.NORB What are you seeing on your end ? Any diff ?
Unfortunately I had no clue about any of this until right now - Im in dev mode on our next prod. so will dip into my accts and see whats up. Over all = If they are split testing it's great, if they give US a few layout options, with/without policy graphic/choice of wording etc. it would be powerful - but forcing this eye soar in front of all my customers after I've already told them about the refund policy is not admirable at all - a tiny seal, a little 10pt bold text, but wtf this is worse than their new doggy mascot imo. I don't want to have to put "If you refund you won't be able to use this" and protect every product I do from now on twice as much because CB just told them how easy it is to scam me and keep my product. It sucks that they don't just have better quality control on what they let in. It's like "ANYONE CAN SELL WITH US! WE SUPPORT GREY!" But when the whole model starts to tip because they are too lax and get way too many refunds (thanks shitty vendors!), it affects everyone in shitty ways like this. There shouldn't be a need for this to begin with. I expect the whole CB lineup of products to take a hit on conversions with this, while they scrounge and say yes to more vendors because they take a hit in rev too. mind you in the long run may make more due to less fees/maintenance doing refunds. Again should be prevented before step 1 starts for vendors not post sale on shitty deliverables that are rather obvious (or should be) to their review dept. I'm sure they see all kinds. Was hoping this thread was going to be about how you can implement your own checkout graphics etc. - improving conversions to stick, not doing proactive loss protection by preventing them... you know you've gone too deep/far when you have to put up a flag like this millions of customers that flow through CB monthly...
I'm sure Clickbank has already received a dozen of emails from the vendors - and they will rethink their strategy If they would have done a quick survey, before implementing this... they would have found the right answer. However I'm still not 100% sure if this so bad as it seems - I would be curious to see the overall stats.(on the entire network)
Don't hold your breath nor deceive yourselves regarding anything they do. I only wish for one thing. ClickBank, if you're reading this, "STOP MESSING WITH OUR MONEY". If you want to make any changes which have "ANY" potential impact on us, give us "WARNING", it's that simple. If you want to split test and can actually figure out how to do so scientifically, create "YOUR OWN" product, pay for "YOUR OWN" traffic, and test away. I understand that outages will happen, but this deliberate "THEFT" should not. Hank
Regardless of the outcome of this we will now consider clickbank as an unstable platform to base the business on. I am now checking to diversify our products and especially all future products with other processors. i think that as adwords is/was unstable and needed a vendor/affiliate to diversify his business by using other PPC search engines now clickbank are showing the same symptoms. the cure is to spread your eggs in several baskets AKA payment processors in this case. i know this is a very old insight but up until a few month ago we felt clickbank as stable and convenient and did not have good reason to search for other alternatives. however this has now changed regardless of the outcome of what clickbank will do with their order form. its too risky to base your business just on one payment processor that can effect your entire marketing without a warning which has been demonstrated very well with this recent clickbank change. in addition we will start to split test clickbank with plimus/sharesale for our prodcut and report back with our results regarding refund rates and conversions.
Hmmm, so this is probably why my refunds have been high the past few days. I thought I was just having some bad luck, but yeah that big banner definitely screams "order the product and get a refund right away, no problem at all."
@waxman1000 No I am in the US and I don't see it either. I have never seen it yet. But they said it is random. We should all follow the steps from above and email clickbank and tell them that we do not like it.
I think pushing the refund thing will eventually hurt CB more than it thinks. It won't take people long to learn that they can buy an info product, download it, then ask for a refund and get the product for free. Everyone loses here except the consumer. While there are honest folks out there, we also have a lot of dishonest ones too, especially when money is involved)