Affiliate: DAP vs ClickBank

We are frequently asked, why should someone use DAP’s built-in affiliate program, rather than using ClickBank’s affiliate program.

Here’s the difference in a nutshell.

Advantage: DAP

When you use DAP’s built-in affiliate module, …

1. You don’t have to send your members over to Clickbank to sign up separately for an affiliate account
2. Every member (or buyer)  becomes (at your option, of course) an “automatic” and “instant” affiliate the second they purchase any product or membership level
3. You can do Pay-Per-Lead (can’t do that with CB)
4. You can choose your commission level to whatever you want (CB forces minimum & maximum commission percentages)
5. You control who signs up for your Affiliate program (can’t do that with CB)
6. You can kick spammers and abusers out of your affiliate program (can’t do that with CB)
7. If you use CB, then every person who arrives at your web site through another CB affiliate’s link, can easily screw the original affiliate, and end up purchasing your product through their own CB affiliate link. But your affiliates can’t screw other affiliates when you use DAP. So DAP helps you protect your affiliates’ commissions. Which means, your affiliates will promote you more happily and aggressively, because they know their commissions are safe.
8. CB is a bad choice of affiliate program in the IM and web-savvy niches, because everyone knows about CB, and everyone knows how to replace your affiliate nickname with theirs, and steal your affiliate’s commissions from right under your nose. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
9. If you use CB, if an affiliate didn’t get credited for a sale you know that they brought in (for whatever reason), there’s no way to manually credit that affiliate for the purchase. Using DAP, you can do this (starting v3.9)
10. You cannot credit or pay affiliates for offline payments with CB. You can do that with DAP (starting v3.9).

Advantage: ClickBank

Of course, you should also be aware of the flip side.

1. CB has a large built-in community of affiliates that you can take advantage of to promote your product (of course, actually finding them and getting them excited enough to promote you is another thing altogether)
2. CB takes care of handling commission payments and refunds and charge-backs – so it is less work for you as the admin.
3. When you use a 3rd party like CB, some affiliates may prefer that, especially if they don’t know you, don’t trust you to make the payments on time, or your site is new (or not popular yet).

Related Reading: Leveraging Multiple Affiliate Networks