Now when you login you'll see ftc similar guidelines and one of them is.. ======= You will not offer, suggest or imply the availability of any rebates, coupons, tickets, vouchers or similar incentives to induce or encourage the purchase of a Product. ====== Does it mean no coupons to be offered for your product?
Yes everybody saw it because they had to when they logged into their account. You have never been able to offer rebates or coupons so nothing has changed at all with regards to that.
I really don't understand that policy, what the heck does ClickBank care? It's my commission, and it's my right to give a portion of it back to a buyer if I want to - they still make the sale, and probably more sales than they would otherwise, so why would they be against this? -DTM
Yeah nothing has changed .. since they last updated the TOS. The commissions are low enough for certain products why would we offer any discounts? Al.
A vendor offering a discount is not the same as an affiliate offering a coupon. If I know I'm getting a $27 commission and I offer a $15 coupon to visitors as an affiliate so I can make a load more $12 conversions that's unbalancing the market and interference wiht other affiliates ability to earn their expected commissions. The vendor and clickbank sets the MSRP. Affiliates are allowed to offer only at the MSRP, or by mentioning specific vendor discounts. I haven't read the whole TOS recently but I think cash back or purchase-credit style incentives from affiliates have always been against the clickbank TOS.
This may be reductio ad absurdum, or slippery slope fallacy at the least, but if you think about it, as affiliates trying to out do other affiliates you may offer a discount to a customer to get the commission over someone else, so then that someone else has to start offering discounts too, but at a higher discount (reducing the net profit by even more for the affiliate). Cycle continues until it's so marginal that affiliates complain to Clickbank or just drop out altogether so the vendor starts losing affiliates and thus cash. If you're the super star that gets majority of the sales anyway it won't be a big thing, but if you're earning a measly percentage of sales or even medium percentage and you start discouraging other affiliates then it becomes bad for the vendor, and this is bad for Clickbank. Again, this might be fallacious since I honestly have no clue about the ratio of people that actually search for discounts for products and then that buy only through discounted links and competition between discounts, but this is all I got.