Clickbank

Clickbank

ClickBank is the most popular credit card processing company for sites that sell electronically delivered products. The reason for this is that the also run your affiliate program and it's very easy to get people to sign up.

For Vendors
The popularity of ClickBank stems from it's ease of use. It only takes a few minutes to sign up and integrating it into your site is simple. The set up cost is also quite low - only $49.95 at the time of writing. They then charge you 7.5% + $1.00 for each sale. These per sale fees are possibly a bit high but the fact is that everyone is selling electronic products like eBooks and software so it doesn't matter too much.
Once you have signed up, all you need to do is create an "Order Now" link on your site and a page for your customers to download your product. ClickBank looks after the rest. They take the payment details and the redirect the customer back to your download page.
The fact that ClickBank is so popular offers benefits from a sales perspective because many people have dealt with them before and have no concerns about security.
ClickBank allows you to set up an affiliate program with your account. You can set commissions at any level that you want - some merchants are offering commissions up to 80%. ClickBank has over 150 000 affiliates signed up and all of them can promote your product just by going to the affiliate area and grabbing your link.
It's not a perfect process but it is very easy to use.

For Affiliates
Affiliates have easy access to thousands of products via the ClickBank Marketplace. You don't need to apply to join a specific vendor's affiliate program - you have access to all of them. Merchants tend to pay commissions of around 30% - 50% but there are some that are higher.
For any sales that you make, ClickBank will send you a check every two weeks. I've been dealing with them for a long time and the always pay when they are supposed to.
There are issues with their affiliate program. Unfortunately, everyone can buy through their own link which means there is a good chance that you will have sales stolen. Fortunately, not everyone does this but as many as 25% of people do.
Basically, everyone should sign up with ClickBank because it is simple to use and the commissions tend to be good. One thing to keep in mind though is that the percentage that you are paid is calculated after ClickBank takes it's 7.5% + $1.00 fee. So, 50% on a $50.00 product is not $25.00 - you get around $22.50.

Summary
I tend to think that there are better options around than ClickBank but there is no one who is more popular. This means that a vendor may be able to find a better processing and affiliate management service but they don't have automatic access to 150 00 affiliates. From an affiliate's point of view - there is nowhere else on the net that you can find thousands of electronically delivered products to promote.
Anyone looking to promote products as an affiliate should sign up and I would recommend that anyone selling their first electronic product should use them to sell it. If your business grows and you release more products later you may have better options but by then you should have created a loyal group of affiliates. No company helps you get started as well as ClickBank does.