The other day I was on Clickbank requesting a price increase for my account. (So I can charge more for products.) Guess what? I discovered how you can sell physical products with Clickbank!
As you might know, Clickbank is a payment processor that you can use to handle payments. As far as I am concerned, PayPal is #1 and Clickbank #2. With PayPal you get paid instantly, but with Clickbank, you have access to 100,000+ affiliates to promote your stuff.
Clickbank handles all the affiliate payments and everything, and heck — they even added support for recurring billing this year (membership sites) and an IPN so you can integrate it with a script.
The only problem? Clickbank only wants you to sell digital products. This is because they have a pretty buyer-centric refund policy and don’t want to be like PayPal where it is a big issue to get the physical product back.
So with Clickbank you can have a membership site with affiliates, but no physical product delivery — like Jim Edwards did with The Net Reporter. ($77 per month and in addition to access to the membership site, he mailed you a physical DVD video every month.)
Here’s the loophole for selling physical products with Clickbank… I noticed the following in Clickbank’s terms of service:
You may also offer shipped delivery of printed media (books, CD’s, and DVD’s) as a courtesy to qualified customers (e.g., US and Canada only), provided the shipped media is clearly complementary and not essential to the operation of the originally downloaded digital product.
After having a Clickbank account for 6 years, I never noticed that. What you have to do is provide your members with a hybrid delivery. (Coined by John Reese.) When someone buys this physical product from you, provide 100% of the content in downloadable form — for instant gratification — then ship the physical materials as bonuses, for added value.
That’s what you should be doing with physical products in the first place and that’s what I recommended to Steven Schwartzman when he was disappointed about the Five Minute Articles WSO. Sales picked up after he added the hybrid product delivery.
I am really resisting the push into physical products. I am looking at a gigantic map of how my upsells connect to one another (drawn in Visio). There are about 60 products in that map… not all of them are connected.
I showed that map to Steven Schwartzman and this is what he had to say:
In regards to the image…WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have nothing else to say about that except wow. It’s amazing to see how many products you have when it’s displayed like that. You can create a course on making those maps.
I recently recorded 4.5 hours of Camtasia PowerPoints for Software Secrets Exposed. This means now, not only do I offer the book, I also offer six 45 minute videos and six audio CDs.
The audio CDs are just the audio from the videos but it means you can burn them and listen to them in your car or whatever.
Should I have released this as a physical product?
- Maybe set the price low at $17 just for the PDF.
- They click to order, and have the chance to get just the audios at $37.
- They click to order, and have the chance to get the audios plus the videos for $47.
- They click to order, and have the chance to get the package for $97 as a set of 3 DVDs plus 6 audio CDs mailed to them.
There are some really good fulfillment services like SwiftCD where all the shipping info is grabbed from PayPal, but yet another drawback is getting my customers on my follow-up list as well for updates.
Could you please comment below and let me know if I should have released this update as a physical product? Have you yourself released a physical product?
Is it even worth the hassle dealing with the shipping problems and refunds… especially since with Clickbank, you can’t get those physical items back?
