I sent out a couple of tweets when I was in the process of trying to decide where I will full-fill my digital products. I have the capability to do it myself with the various plugins for WordPress and Drupal, but I really wanted to outsource as much as possible. Another important thing is that I want to be up and running in very little time, when that time comes.
Automate, Automate, Automate
After I made the decision to automate as much as possible, I had to decide on the fulfilment service I would use. The two biggies based on my research and response to my twitter tweets are E-Junkie and Clickbank.
I have used both Clickbank and E-Junkie as an affiliate over the years and on that front I liked both equally. Easy to apply, promote, and get paid. As I am working on the other side now I had more research to do.
The largest difference between Clickbank and E-Junkie is that E-junkie is an online shopping cart, and Clickbank is a full featured online sales site with payment processing, refunds, recurring charges, etc. This makes comparison a little deceptive, but for now I am looking for a full cart and large affiliate network so they both offer this.
Some of the metrics that I am using include:
- Cost
- Billing options
- Professional look
Cost
Clickbank has a great page about their vendor charges, but I had to do a google search to find it. I am planning to sell products one-off without recurring billing so it is relativeley easy to figure out the cost.
$49.95 to set up the product
7.5% +$1 of every sale. (If it is a $50 product they charge $4.75)
E-junkie has a monthly cost model based on amount of space and # of products. Currently I have 8 products in mind and all 8 will take less that 100MB of harddrive. space. The HD space takes me to the $10 a month model.
I suspect that all my products will have an average cost of $20, and at a minimum of 50 units a month. (my goal will be 150 by 2014).
Clickbank cost – $237.5 a month (before chargebacks etc)
E-junkie cost – $10
Billing Options
Clickbank is a full service company and handles all of the billing, taxes, delivery etc.
E-Junkie is a different beast since they are a cart system ONLY. This means that I will have to handle all the money business with my payment processor. Starting out I will be using paypal exclusively, and luckily they have a very easy method of collecting Canadian taxes. I already have the accounting side mostly automated so this will add very little time into my schedule.
Professional Look
This is personal preference but I have always though of Clickbank of being very spammy, both their site and affiliate network. That is not to say that they aren’t good, but the signal to noise is not very high. E-Junkie on the other hand looks cleaner, from researching products to promote on my sites they have a selection that I tend to think is more in line with my market.
My decision
I will be going with E-Junkie for the time being. For me the cost is what sells it right now. I don’t want to pay a few hundred dollars when I am bootstrapping this effort. I am decent at developing my own sites, accounting, etc so the entire suit offered by Clickbank is not beneficial to me at this time.
In a year I will re-evaluate to see what is the better option for me at that time.
What has your experience been?
