How The ClickBank Marketplace Works

ClickBank's 100,000+ affiliates earn a percentage of every purchase made by every customer they refer to any ClickBank product. These affiliates generate well over half of the sales of our top selling products. The ClickBank Marketplace is where affiliates go to select the products to which they will refer traffic.

Every product listed in the ClickBank Marketplace is associated with a sales commission rate. Commission percentages range from 1% to 75%. On any one sale the minimum commission is $0.25 and the maximum is $100.00.

In the Marketplace products are ranked by their "productivity score". To preserve the integrity of the system we do not publish the formula for the score, or the score itself, but we can say that it is a function of these factors:

$Earned/Sale: Average net amount earned per affiliate per referred sale. Note that this is the net earned per actual sale, and so it is impacted by refunds, chargebacks, and sales taxes. Unfunded sales, such as returned checks, do not impact this number.
Future $: Average total rebill revenue earned by the affiliate due to sales from a site. Generally this equates to the average sum of all rebills.
Total $: The sum of all initial sales and rebills divided by the number of initial sales. It is the average total $ per sale, including all rebills that may come from that sale.
%Earned/Sale: Average percentage commission earned per affiliate per referred sale. This number should only vary if the vendor has changed their payout percentage over time.
%Referred: Fraction of vendor's total sales that are referred by affiliates.
Gravity: Number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the vendor's products. This is a weighted sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks we add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added.

All factors are combined, and adjusted such that more recent sales activity is given greater weight.

To improve their Marketplace ranking products must show a history of reliably converting referred traffic to paying customers over the past 8 weeks. Products that maintain a higher ranking naturally attract more affiliates, and make more sales overall.