Operate in Real Time with the ClickBank API

Posted by: Dush Ramachandran, VP of Business Development

If you sell or promote digital products through ClickBank, wouldn’t you like to know where your customers are, and what days of the week and times of day they buy your products? With ClickBank’s introduction of the Instant Notification API, whether you’re a publisher or an affiliate you can do all that and more.

The Instant Notification API, or application program interface, provides a way by which information captured at the time of purchase can be provided by the ClickBank system to another computer. If you are signed up to receive instant notifications, you can set up a program on your computer to receive the information that ClickBank sends as soon as a transaction takes place.

Ordinarily, this transaction information is sent to publishers by means of a notification email, which needs to be parsed in order to collect this data. With the API, all of this same information can be collected instantaneously, as each transaction occurs. Additionally, now affiliates can also gather this transaction data as the sale occurs, which was previously only possible for publishers.

With the API and a corresponding data collection program in place on your computer, you can easily determine from which country or zip code most of your sales originate and direct your advertising efforts to media in those markets. You can analyze the times of day that are most popular with your customers and use day part bidding, or Ad Scheduling as Google refers to it (covered in an earlier post by Beau Blackwell), to show your ads at the times when your customers are most likely to see them and make a purchase.

Publishers with multiple accounts can take instant notifications from all their accounts and have the day’s sales aggregated and displayed, showing sales for all of their products across various geographical locations and time zones. Since the API will output information on all transactions, including sales, refunds and chargebacks, this capability can give you a minute-to-minute update on the status of your business through ClickBank.

Please be aware that this service is intended for use by experienced programmers. If you don’t have extensive programming skills, you should consider enlisting the services of a programmer to help you take advantage of the Instant Notification API.

Be sure to check out details on the Instant Notification API and explore how it can give you a better handle on your business.

7 Responses to “Operate in Real Time with the ClickBank API”

  • Jim K says:

    Am I missing something? I don’t see a post – just a title.

  • Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator says:

    Hi Jim,

    Sorry about that! There was a glitch with Internet Explorer on a couple of posts, but I’ve fixed them now. Thanks for letting us know.

    Beau

  • Edward says:

    Is there any way for an affiliate to receive instant email notifications when a sale is made?

  • Monty's Mega Marketing says:

    Ah, it’s about time. This should be a great feature.

  • Dush Ramachandran says:

    ClickBank does not send out email notifications of transactions to affiliates. However, the Instant Notification API is available to affiliates as well. Alternatively the affiliate may download CSV files (that can be manipulated with Excel) from either the transaction screen or the paycheck screen in their account.

  • Brad Wickwire says:

    You should be able to pass the API url through the purchase form so if a user has XXX different products he can have it send the payment to the correct products webpage automatically.

  • David Gaddy says:

    Does the API provide any methods of retrieving marketplace data? Specifically avg pay, percent, gravity, etc.?

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