Except not really
You can hear it often, “Clickbank doesn’t allow physical products” and sometimes you may have heard “Clickbank allows physical products”
Well, they do, but not how you think.
They “allow” – “shippable media”… as if you needed their permission.
I’ve read other IMers blogs and articles about how it’s so great they offer physical products.
I hesitate to post this in case I just don’t get it and I end up making a fool out of myself.
I welcome correction.
Either they are on drugs or I am cause I don’t know what they are so excited about – keep reading.
The last two days I have been throwing around an idea for a product and wondered if I could offer a physical version as an option.
My dilemma is the following:
1) I need a reliable product fulfillment company with good features
I don’t know anything about this stuff.
I don’t want to reproduce these on my own or have someone else do it and then send them to me and fill my bedroom with my products so that I can run to the post office to mail them.
Nope.
I want simple for me.
If I have to use two or three different services and glue them together, especially if it gets technical and a pain in the butt that does not appeal to me either.
I’d rather not do it.
Kunaki or some similar service could be an option but the ones that are easy and simple to use like these only do CD/DVDs to my knowledge and not printed reading material and not “packages” and by that I mean something that comes in a fancy box with the art work I want – something high end and custom looking. Not doing some custom box is usually not a big deal, not for the product I have in mind anyway, but it would be nice to be able to do in the future but right now it’s not important.
But a service that produces and fulfills with it’s own shopping cart or that can easily integrate with a reliable one is a must for me.
I don’t want headaches.
I just don’t get the “inbetween” – order placed in shopping cart to the company gets the order and fulfills it when they are separate services unless there’ a way to seamlessly connect them and they communicate back and forth well fro not only the sake for orders but also for refunds (shopping cart speaks to fulfillment company and fulfillment company speaks to shopping cart)
I want them (whoever) to take the payment, then hold it, money back guarantee period is up I get my check they take their cut, if there’s a return they take it and refurbish it if needed and handle refunds and so on.
This most likely does not include affiliate programs unless it’s just tracking and I have to look at it and sit at my computer once a month and pay whoever I owe, so then…
2) How do I pay affiliates?
I want to compensate affiliates but I like the Clickbank set up where they handle all the payments, refunds, etc. and is not a responsibility of mine,.
I’m MORE than happy to give these services a cut to take that burden away from me.
With Clickbank (or so I thought – or did I?) I thought they didn’t do physical products (and by “do” I mean something like I described above in point 1).
I want affiliates and want to pay them even on the upsells or most of them anyway if it makes sense for me but I DON’T want to do the paying – meaning having to add up and figure out who I owe commissions to and how much – I want someone else to do that.
What I want doesn’t exist I bet – so I’d either have to do it myself or hire someone.
More BS.
That’s another pain in the neck I don’t want to have to do if I don’t have to.
So I figured “OK, I can’t pay affiliates on the physical product” but what I can probably do with the Clickbank set up is:
a) Create digital version and give it a higher value (ie. $147) and offer a commission % to make up for not making a commission on the physical version. Probably 60% – 65%, half of the first product and extra to make up for half of the physical product and also maybe factor in that most may not take the second offer so it’s not like affiliates would always make a commission on that anyway.
b) Get a Kunaki type service and integrate with Paypal or other and offer the physical version only after the digital version has been sold and not offer it as an option upfront (For affiliate’s sake). Then say something like “this DVD and Book package has a value of $197 and since you already got the digital version I will not even offer it for the difference ($50) but add the physical version for just $19.95 to $29.95 (and maybe the DVD even has a couple extra bonus chapters not in the online version)”
c) If they say “no” to that affiliate gets sales commission anyway and I get my cut plus a new customer and customer is given the online version. If they say yes I can’t do a one click upsell so they’ll have to pull out their card again but after placing that order it is on its way to them and they get taken to the online version they can get started with while they wait.
And this is NOT my ideal setup but it’s the only thing I could think of last night.
To be honest this stuff confuses the heck out of me with physical products and fulfillment.
(If anyone has any recommendations and can educate me by the way I’m all ears)
Well, I stumbled on this yesterday:
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-tools/shippable-media/
And went “Whoa! Could it REALLY be!?”
That information on their site isn’t very clear to me about how products get delivered – in one way it seems that they would but in another sense the wording sounds like they don’t (to me anyway) at the same time.
So I asked them and got this reply this morning:
Hello, Thank you for your inquiry!
ClickBank is designed specifically for the sale of digitally delivered products and services such as ebooks, downloadable softwares, and memberships to websites. Unfortunately, we are unable to accept the sale of solely physical products. We can sell a physical product only when it accompanies a digital product, such as an ebook or website membership.
For instance, a weight loss ebook can be sold through ClickBank with an accompanying motivational CD shipped to the customer, but the motivational CD cannot be sold through ClickBank on its own. For more information on what types of products are available to be sold by ClickBank, please see the following article:
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-basics/selling-basics/what-products-are-allowed/
ClickBank does not have a list of reproduction and fulfillment companies because this is done completely done at the vendors discretion.
Thank you,
Tiffany Senior Client Services
OK, so from reading the original page I had found Clickbank will allow you to sell a physical product after you have also sold someone a digital product, refunds on physical products are automatic 7 days after being requested by the customer, they say, and I learned from her this morning they don’t fulfill so that means that when I customer asks them for a refund they WILL get it sometimes after 7 days from the original refund request “to give you time to get your physical product returned to you” (paraphrased).
So basically you can sell a physical product and anyone can ask for a refund and they WILL get it and because they don’t handle any of the fulfillment the refundee can keep the product, too.
What kind of bullshit is this?
That’s like the problem with not being able to return a digital product and now with Clickbank people don’t have to return physical products because since Clickbank dosn’t ship them they don’t wait to get them back before giving a refund.
They just go ahead and give them the refund.
Wow. Thanks a million.
I could do that anyway without Clickbank – yes, without the luxury of their 1Click Upsell but by sending the person to another offer through a different payment processor – Clickbank CAN’T stop people from doing that ANYWAY so what are they really doing for us besides taking the money for us and giving away refunds?
Then if I read the page she gave me it says physical products are “complimentary” – What the heck does that mean?
So are they just for gifts (yes, GIFTS – their wording says “complImentary” NOT “complEmentary”) after ordering a digital product so then why take payments? – unless you are only charging for shipping? And if that’s it you don’t get that shipping and handling fee right away anyway. I *guess* they would hold it like they do regular payments.
What’s good about this?
Can’t you do that without them anyway?
From the first link I gave you it says “You must use ClickBank’s Customer Support Ticket System to respond to tech support or refund requests” (for physical products I suppose rather than tell customers to come to your help desk for support)
So I have to provide support for free shit?
They give refunds for free shit?
Maybe I just don’t get it but…
What the heck is Clickbank babbling about?
Can someone please tell me I’m wrong?
One thing they say in YIN and another thing they say is YANG.
Did they just make up some half ass physical product “shipping” feature as a part of their service and make it sound better than it is just to be able to say “we finally do physical products now!”
Thanks, Tiffany. But no, thanks.
Here’s what I can do instead: Their policy says that after payment digital products should be delivered within 24 hours. Therefore, if I don’t *have to* give products to people RIGHT AFTER they order then, I am completely allowed to make another offer for a physical version (value of this minus cost of digital version for example) through another payment processor before sending them to their download anyway and have a “no thanks” option on that page that will take them to their download also and at least I can control the refunds to make sure I get my product back in decent condition minus shipping and handling before I give any money back with MY money back guarantee period.
Push comes to shove I could just make them the offer later by email and figure out how to craft something to make that convert for me.
So, thanks for a whole lotta nothing, Clickbank.
That’s a nice and useless new feature you’ve got there.
- Sancho
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
It sounds to me they want to get some brownie points for offering a sub-standard additional service. According to your summary, their refund policy completely kills any chance of this working for anyone who is selling serious volumes.
I have been down this road and let me tell you (we’re talking 2006 – 2008 here, i don’t know if there are companies now that offer the all-in-one solution you’re looking for) this aint easy and it aint cheap.
My wife and I, both very experienced online marketers, started a children’s book club much like the Scholastic/Disney thing where you get a whole bunch of stuff like a kids backpack and stickers, plus free books in the intro shipment, then two books in the series every month thereafter. So this will totally physical product.
We designed our own system to integrate with the API of the payment processor (Cybersource), because you can’t use some third party like Paypal when you’re advertising on CPA networks. After the batch capture, a cron job would build the orders for the day previous and ftp them to the fullfilment house.
Fulfillment is not cheap. They charge for every gnats ass thing they can think of and it’s also tiered in many cases. There will be a flat fee for ‘picking’ each order (from the warehouse shelf) and another fee usually for every additional item included in the package after the first one. They charge the storage fee by pallets usually.
If you don’t want the cost of the postage to appear stamped on the outside of the package, you need to use what’s called an ‘indicia’ and use ‘media mail’. An indicia is something that the fulfillment company will often be able to supply, but it might involve some haggling and time to set up. basically, your postage will be calculated and paid through their account with the USPS, and each of your mail pieces will not show that you only paid $2.30, when you actually charged the customer $9.95 for shipping. (Keep in mind that different zones cost different amounts to ship to, so you need to cover that expense.)
Additionally, some fulfillment companies will charge you to take your daily orders down to the post office. This will likely be a flat fee but it could be substantial so make sure not to overlook it. I think USPS changed their policy to cut costs and no longer do the free pickup service.
And then we have returns. Fulfillment co. will charge you per order returned, and may even charge a re-stocking fee per item. They often did a poor job of reporting returns which was not automated and required me to sit down once a week and process the returns and refunds through the virtual terminal in Cybersource’s business center.
We looked at getting fancy boxes but they just turned out to be too expensive. I was going to have a custom printed box with an image that overlapped the flaps on the top side. (Note: white boxes are never a good idea because they arrive at the customer’s house dirty and scuffed.) We opted for a plain brown carton and got some full color stickers made to slap on each one. This was much cheaper and didn’t add any cost to the packing charges.
Now, to be fair, our business had a staggering amount of inventory on the shelves and the books were quite heavy, as they were hardcover kids books plus extra stuff. As a result the storage costs were insane. We used three different fulfillment companies over the two years because they all sucked. Eventually we were using the same one that does Scholastic’s book fulfillment. Trouble was they were too big and they ran very inefficiently.
To sum it up, this whole experience was a nightmare from start to finish. Every day was a new lesson in managing the early onset of insanity. My advice is keep looking for that company that supplies the whole box and dice.
Thank you very much Nick.
Your valuable reply is like a post in itself and I now feel a little more educated in this.
From the way it sounds I don’t think I will be getting into physical products anytime soon.
Services like Kunaki might be the most convenient way to go for info products (that aren’t real books) and audio and video content.
“It sounds to me they want to get some brownie points for offering a sub-standard additional service.”
Yes, that’s one of the things that struck me as I looked into Clickbank’s physical product “feature” and analyzed everything.
It’s a joke.
I can’t believe what great praise it gets from people who find out about it.
Maybe it’s just an excuse to make a post for content on their blogs and have everyone thanking them for it.
As I said before it’s also silly that they (CB) say they now “allow” this when you didn’t even need their permission anyway and their policy seems contradictory.
Thanks again for your great post,
Sancho
I’m glad I was able to share some of my experiences in this area. And I didn’t know about Kunaki either, so thanks for that. I’m releasing a new product shortly and this is perfect for what I need.
You’re welcome.
For anyone else that’s interested you can find Kunaki here: http://www.kunaki.com/
Another one is: http://www.cd-fulfillment.com/default.asp
I’m sure there are others, too.
For anything that can be shipped on digital media these types of services are ideal over what we were talking about earlier.
Too bad they don’t do at least soft cover or some sort of printed material.
I just spoke to a friend of mine who has used http://iuniverse.com for that. They do printing on demand. I can’t vouch for their service but I know they do offer payment processing, printing and fulfillment all under one roof. you just supply the electronic version and they set it up as a template that can be printed on demand for each day’s orders. They do not offer refunds, so as far as I know, the chargeback issue won’t be a problem with them.
Thanks for that. I’ve read that they aren’t very trustworthy and seen several complaints online. Some people say they are fine. People should do their diligence.
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