ClickBank officials say they’ve taken a phased approach to this endeavor, starting with the translation of the order form and all customer related material such as receipt emails and customer service content into German, Spanish and French. Having completed that phase last year, the company moved onto phase two—translation of the entire ClickBank site outside the login into the same three languages. Work on this phase has just been finished and the new pages are live as of today.

“More than one third of the 26,000 transactions ClickBank processes each day are made from outside the U.S.,” said Dush Ramachandran, ClickBank vice president of sales, marketing and business development. “It is important that we continue to cater to international markets. The globalization of our platform is just one of the many benefits we offer our global vendors and affiliates.”

In addition to offering content in multiple languages, ClickBank has made significant improvements to its payment processing and accepts 13 international currencies including the Euro, the British Pound, and the Swedish and Danish Kroner

Recurring Billing

You have spoken and we listened.  We’ve made changes to our analytics tool that will help vendors and affiliates who promote recurring billing products.  Previously, it was not possible for you to differentiate between sales made through the ClickBank Order Form and rebills on recurring billing products you sell or promote.  This made the conversion statistics (Hops Per Order, Earnings Per Hop, and Order Form Sale Conversion) difficult to work with when reporting on recurring billing products.

With our release on October 26, 2009, you will now be able to differentiate rebills from sales that occur on the ClickBank Order Form.  We have added two new fields in analytics called Initial Sales Count and Initial Sale Amount.  These fields represent sales made on a standard product and the initial sale of a recurring billing product.  These fields also replace Gross Sales in the conversion statistics (Hops Per Order, Earnings Per Hop, and Order Form Sale Conversion).

Coming in the near future, we will also introduce new analytics reports designed to further inform our clients on their recurring billing promotions.

Vendor Tracking ID

Our October 26, 2009 release will also be the introduction of reporting by Tracking ID for our Vendors.  This feature has been, and will remain, available for our affiliates.

ClickBank VP Dush Ramachandran recently wrote an article for DMNews.com discussing the possibility of upcoming Federal Trade Commission regulations on the affiliate marketing and blogging industries, and gives some thoughts about the possible outcomes. Be sure to check it out, as this topic is likely to affect everyone involved in affiliate marketing and blogging very soon.

In late June, Amazon terminated its marketing affiliate program in North Carolina after a new law took effect that will tax affiliate sales, and on July 1, Overstock.com notified affiliates in Hawaii, North Carolina and Rhode Island that it would immediately cease doing business with them because of similar new tax laws.

But ClickBank, a major online retailer, says it has no intention of terminating relationships with affiliates in certain locations or discontinuing its longstanding policy of collecting and remitting taxes to the appropriate tax authorities in various domestic and international jurisdictions.

“We will continue to honor sales agreements with affiliates in the U.S. and abroad, despite new taxes that are being levied against them for sales and marketing efforts,” said Dush Ramachandran, vice president of sales, marketing and business development for ClickBank.

“One of the benefits of being a ClickBank affiliate is that you can operate wherever you live,” said Ramachandran. “We don’t want to place limits on that now. Our affiliates deserve the opportunity to earn income regardless of where they live, and ClickBank will continue to support them in their efforts to do so.”

New state tax laws aim to collect sales tax revenues from affiliates whose marketing activities lead to ecommerce sales. The key issue is whether the affiliates have a physical presence in a state that taxes ecommerce activities. The state of New York was the first to enact such tax laws, and more states are following suit.

ClickBank VP Dush Ramachandran

Broomfield, Colo. – (August 6, 2009) – Dush Ramachandran, vice president of sales, marketing  and business development for ClickBank, a major online retail outlet, will share advice and industry insight on microniche marketing at Affiliate Summit East Aug. 9-11 in New York City.

ClickBank is widely considered to be an international leader in affiliate marketing with more than 100,000 active affiliate marketers working with the company to market its products and drive sales to a level of more than 26,000 transactions per day.

Ramachandran’s presentation is titled “Microniches – the Way to Mega Profits.” It will be available to only platinum and gold pass holders at Affiliate Summit East, which is now sold out with more than 2,000 affiliate marketers registered to attend.

“Using real-life case studies, I’ll demonstrate how affiliate marketers can promote products in a wide variety of small and focused niches, where there is little competition and marketing and advertising costs are inexpensive,” Ramachandran said.

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ClickBank also will unveil its newly designed trade show booth at Affiliate Summit East. The booth features a sleek new look, two oversized flat screen monitors, Astroturf flooring and an electronic ticker that displays ClickBank client payouts in real-time.

Ramachandran serves on the advisory board of Affiliate Summit and Affilicon, the international counterpart to Affiliate Summit, and helps plan content for both organizations’ affiliate marketing conferences. The conferences are widely considered a key source for affiliate marketing thought leadership and industry expertise.

Ramachandran joined ClickBank in 2005. He is responsible for ClickBank’s sales and marketing activities and alliances with affiliate and vendor organizations worldwide. Ramachandran has held executive leadership positions with domestic and international firms such as Requisite Technology, Conceptual Technologies, Computervision Corp., Prime Computer, Inc. and Datapoint Corp. He holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from St. Joseph’s College, Bangalore University, and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management.

Earlier this week, we released several major improvements to our system that will help both vendors and affiliates grow and improve their businesses. In case you missed them, here’s a recap of what we released.

Help Center

You’ve probably already seen the new Help Center tab on the right-hand side of our navigation bar, but if not, be sure to check it out! The Help Center contains many new articles for both affiliates and vendors, covering everything from creating a ClickBank account to attracting more affiliates and learning about common ways to promote products. It’s a great place to look for any information you need about being more successful as a ClickBank client.

New & Improved Client Analytics

We’ve made major improvements to our Client Analytics, allowing you to see more detail than ever about your sales and promotions. Our improved Client Analytics lets you look at trends, order form impressions data, reporting by various dimensions like geographic location, and more.

To view the new Client Analytics, log in to your account and click the Reporting tab. Then click Analytics NEW! on the right side of the subnav:

To read more about all the features Client Analytics has to offer, and how to use it, see our Help Center article.

Integrated Sales Reporting

Clients can now track successful orders (conversions) by linking the ClickBank order process to Google Analytics, Google AdWords, and Yahoo Search Marketing, giving you more information about sales and the effectiveness of promotional efforts than ever before.

Read more about Integrated Sales Reporting in the Help Center.

ClickBank API

The ClickBank API makes it possible for a wide range of computer programs to securely access ClickBank account information on behalf of ClickBank account owners. Some of the functions available to users of the API include the ability to:

• Request a refund for a customer’s purchase
• Request a cancelation for a customer’s subscription
• Retrieve a list of transactions in a ClickBank account for a given timeframe

Read more about the ClickBank API in the Help Center.

For example, when a customer completes an order, ClickBank will display the vendor’s first selected upsell Pitch Page. The customer may accept or decline the product, after which the vendor can show another offer in a sequence they’ve specified, or proceed directly to a confirmation page showing all of the items purchased and their corresponding download links. Regardless of how many upsell offers the customer purchases, they won’t be required to enter their payment information again.

To ensure this exciting new feature meets your needs, we would like your feedback for the following:

• Are you interested in this feature?
• Do you think you’ll use it?
• Do you have any suggestions or recommendations for ways to improve this feature?

ClickBank will soon be releasing major improvements to our reporting analytics capabilities. We understand that our vendors and affiliates rely on timely information from ClickBank to effectively manage their business. In that spirit, we are pleased to be introducing several new and exciting features:

• Interactive Trend Charting
• Order Form Impressions Data
• Expanded Dimensions with Drilldown Capability
• Expanded Date Range
• Improved Performance
  

Interactive Trend Charting
Imagine being able to see daily sales trended graphically at the click of a button. Now imagine being able to view that same trend for a particular geographic location…or product…or tracking ID. Quickly compare those sales to the number of Hops or order form impressions during the same time period. All this and much more will be at your fingertips when the new reporting analytics interactive trend charting capabilities are released. Enjoy the freedom of exploring and learning from the intricacies of your sales and sales funnel data.

Order Form Impressions Data
Further understand the sales funnel of your business as potential customers navigate from HopLinks to pitch pages to order forms to order completion. Also manage your sales retention efforts on the other side of the funnel by viewing refund and chargeback rates.

Expanded Dimensions with Drilldown Capability
Find new ways to slice and dice your business with the introduction of several new dimensions. New dimensions include customer country, customer province, product, category, currency, language, and billing type. Also, you can further explore each dimension. For example, you will be capable of seeing trends on your sales in Australia, France, or any other country where your product has sold.

Expanded Date Range
Explore your data in time frames you define, whether that be for the last 3 days or the last 3 months. Data is available for up to the last 120 days.

Improved Performance
We understand that interacting with your business information requires a smooth and timely experience, and our technical team has paid great attention to building a tool that responds quickly.

We would like to invite you to participate in the pilot of this exciting new feature. To participate, you must use at least one of the following programs:

- Google Analytics

- Google AdWords

- Yahoo Search Marketing

If you use one of these programs and would like to participate, simply fill out the form below with your name, ClickBank nickname, email address, and which of the three programs you use.

Please note that only a limited number of respondents will secure a spot in the pilot, so apply quickly!

If you are chosen to participate, ClickBank will contact you via email with additional information regarding the pilot.

As part of our recent update to the look and feel of the ClickBank website, we are making visual changes to our order form. A brief but statistically significant split test was recently conducted, and the modified order form outperformed the current order form. Due to these positive results, we will begin using a modified version of our order form on Wednesday, June 17th.

In anticipation of this change, please update your payment link images. New payment button images that reflect our new colors can be found here.