These are commonly used terms in Internet and affiliate marketing, or terms that are unique to ClickBank.

Activated: This product status indicates that you have set up a product, the product has been approved by the Review Team, and you have paid the activation charge. You may now begin selling your product at this point.

Affiliate: A person who promotes products to potential buyers through a variety of online marketing techniques in exchange for a commission on any sales.

Cipher: A method of performing encryption and decryption. It ensures there has been no URL tampering of the query string parameters and can be used to help protect things like a vendor’s Thank You Page.

Debit Backdating: Returns and revokes are backdated 7 days for accounting purposes. For example, if a return is processed on a Thursday after pay period end, the debit is applied to the previous pay period.

HopLink: A customized link to a ClickBank vendor’s website that includes information about the affiliate who referred the visitor. ClickBank uses HopLinks to track affiliate commissions on sales of ClickBank products.

Payment Threshold: The amount, set by the client, that must be reached before ClickBank sends a payment check.

Pending Activation: This product status indicates that you have submitted your product and it has been approved by our Review team. Once you have paid the one-time $49.95 account activation charge, the status will update to Activated.

Pending Approval: This product status indicates that you have listed and saved a product within your account. Please note that this status does not mean that you have submitted your actual product approval request.

Recurring Billing: Products that rebill the customer on a set schedule, such as subscriptions or memberships.

Reseller Link or Referral HopLink: A reseller link is a special HopLink used by ClickBank clients (vendors and affiliates) who wish to earn credit for referring new product vendors to ClickBank. When the reseller link is used by the referred vendor to create a ClickBank account, you are linked to the new vendor.

Return Allowance: ClickBank withholds a fraction from each payment that is credited back to your account after 12 weeks (about 84 days). These funds are used to manage quality issues that may arise with products you publish or promote, including delayed refunds or revoked sales. The standard return allowance is 10%. ClickBank may adjust your return allowance at any time.

Secret Key: A secret key is used while performing encryption and decryption activities in a process called Cipher. The secret key is utilized in two specific features related to your ClickBank account, the Link Security Script service and the Instant Notification service. You can enter a secret key on the My Site page of your ClickBank account. The secret key can be up to 16 letters or digits, and must be in ALL CAPS.

Vendor: Within ClickBank, a person who sells a digitally delivered product or service they’ve created.

XML: Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format. More information can be found about XML at www.w3c.org/XML. Also available in the Marketplace feed file is a .DTD file, which defines the structure of the XML file. The XML link above also has information about .DTD files.