ClickBank provides vendors with the option to grant Lifetime Commissions to an affiliate for bringing a customer to a vendor.

The following subjects are covered in this section:

Overview

In essence, Lifetime Commissions reward an affiliate for driving a customer to make an initial sale from a vendor. In addition to earning a commission on the first sale, whenever the customer makes a subsequent purchase from the same vendor, the affiliate will receive a commission on that purchase as well.

For affiliates, Lifetime Commissions mean a portion of back-end sales on all purchases from the same customer, and therefore earn additional commission for bringing in a new customer to the vendor. From the vendor's perspective, it may be easier to entice high quality affiliates using the incentive of future commissions.

The diagram illustrates the traditional process flow of Lifetime Commissions. First, the vendor enables lifetime commissions. Next, an affiliate drives an initial sale. Next, a customer purchases a product through the affiliate. Finally, the affiliate receives a commission whenever the customer makes a purchase from the vendor.

Commission percentages, and all other properties of the transaction, are no different between a standard sale and a lifetime commission sale. As the vendor, you can still control commission percentages at the product, upsell, and whitelist levels.

Only one affiliate can receive a Lifetime Commission for a given customer. Once this relationship is formed, no other affiliate can receive commission's for that customer's purchases with the specified vendor.

How it Works

As the vendor, you can enable Lifetime Commissions for your account. Once it is enabled, you can pass a parameter with your payment link to create a Lifetime Commission relationship. When an affiliate drives a customer to you, and you drive the customer to your order form with the Lifetime Commission parameter, the affiliate will then receive Lifetime Commissions for that customer.

Once formed, Lifetime Commissions last for the duration of a customer-vendor relationship. Only the termination of an affiliate's account prevents them from receiving Lifetime Commissions.

A customer's email address is used as the primary form of identification for Lifetime Commissions. If the customer does not use the same email address, affiliate attribution is handled normally instead.

Attribution Priority

Lifetime Commissions override all other means of affiliate attribution. This means that, once an affiliate has begun receiving Lifetime Commissions for a specific customer, that affiliate receives a commission even if the customer uses a HopLink from another affiliate.

For example: Affiliate A drives the sale of a customer, establishing a LTC relationship. On a different occasion, Affiliate B drives a different purchase to the same vendor with the same customer. Affiliate B will not receive the commission, but Affiliate A will, even though they had nothing to do with the actual sale.

Refunded Sales

As with a normal transaction, if the customer requests a refund, the affiliate does not keep their commission. However, if a transaction creates a Lifetime Commission relationship, that relationship remains even if the transaction is refunded.

Admin-Controlled Feature

This feature is admin-controlled. Contact ClickBank if you want access to this feature.

Enabling Lifetime Commissions

Once the feature is enabled, you can pass a new parameter via the payment link to enable a Lifetime Commission for the affiliate who drove the sale. The format for a payment link with the parameter is as follows:

http://ITEM.VENDOR.pay.clickbank.net/?altc=True

Once the customer has followed this payment link and made a purchase, the Lifetime Commission relationship is established and cannot be removed.

NOTE – You can disable the Lifetime Commission feature, but any affiliate who is already receiving Lifetime Commissions will continue to do so.

Reporting and Analytics

ClickBank's reporting features include information about whether a transaction involved a Lifetime Commission, and let you search for transactions involving Lifetime Commissions.

Transactions Reporting

A new column has been added to the transaction report called Lifetime Commissions. The column will populate with "NEW" if the transaction created a new lifetime commission link, and "EXISTS" if the transaction paid out an affiliate due to Lifetime Commission rules and the affiliate had previously locked in to Lifetime Commissions for that customer.

This image shows the transaction report table for a hypothetical vendor. The Lifetime Commissions column is circled. Within the column, one transaction has a value of Exists in the Lifetime Commission column, and one transaction has a value of New.

The potential values for the Lifetime Commission field are:

New – This sale established a new vendor-affiliate-customer link.
Exists – A lifetime commission relationship already existed, and this is a subsequent purchase by the customer.
(Blank) – The sale does not involve a Lifetime Commission.

Filter Search

Through this view, a vendor or affiliate is able to filter their transactions to include only Lifetime Commission sales.