ClickBank vs Amazon Associates: Which Affiliate Program Is Better?
Put the two programs side by side on a spreadsheet and ClickBank looks like the obvious choice. It pays 50% to 75% of the sale, sometimes more. Amazon Associates pays 1% to 10%. One is a $60 commission on a $97 course; the other is $4.50 on a $100 blender. Case closed, apparently.
Except that most people who try both end up earning more from Amazon, and the reason is that the commission rate is the least important number in affiliate marketing. What matters is what you earn per visitor, and per visitor Amazon wins for the majority of sites by a wide margin. This guide goes through why, with the actual numbers, and then covers the narrower cases where ClickBank is the right tool.
The short answer
Amazon Associates is the better program for most affiliates, and by a lot for anyone building a content site that earns from search. Shoppers trust Amazon, so they buy; you're paid on the whole cart, not just the item you linked; the products people search for are the products you can link; and refunds are rare on physical goods. ClickBank's percentages are five to fifteen times higher, but they sit on top of conversion rates several times lower and refund rates of 15% to 30% in its biggest categories. Multiply it out and Amazon comes out ahead.
ClickBank makes sense as a second program, added where a digital product fits the topic, or as a primary program for a specific kind of marketer: experienced, running email or paid traffic, in a niche like health, fitness or make-money where a $97 digital offer converts. If that isn't you yet, start with Amazon.
What each program actually is
Amazon Associates
Amazon's own affiliate program, open since 1996. You get a tracking ID, add it to links to any of the hundreds of millions of products on Amazon, and earn a category-based percentage of qualifying purchases. It's built for content: reviews, buyer guides, comparisons. We cover the sign-up process, the 180-day three-sale rule and the ways accounts get closed in our Amazon Associates beginner's guide.
ClickBank
An affiliate network rather than a single retailer. Independent vendors list products, historically e-books, courses, software and memberships, and more recently a large supplements and nutrition category, and set their own commission rates. Affiliates browse the marketplace, pick offers, and send traffic to the vendor's sales page. ClickBank handles the checkout, the payout and the refund. It's been running since 1998 and says it has paid affiliates over $7 billion without missing a payment.
The structural difference matters more than the numbers: on Amazon you're sending someone to a store they already use. On ClickBank you're sending them to a stranger's sales page.
Side by side
| Amazon Associates | ClickBank | |
|---|---|---|
| Commission | 1% to 10% by category (4% default) | 50% to 75% typical, up to 90% |
| Products | Hundreds of millions, physical, every category | ~4,000 offers, mostly digital plus supplements |
| Conversion | High; trusted store, one-click checkout | Low; unfamiliar vendor, long sales page |
| Earn on the whole cart | Yes | No, only the offer (plus upsells) |
| Cookie | 24 hours; 90 days for items added to cart | 60 days |
| Refund window | Typically 30 days | 60 days |
| Typical refund rate | Low single digits on physical goods | 15% to 30% in the biggest niches |
| Approval | Instant to start; 3 sales within 180 days to keep it | Instant, no approval |
| Payout | About 60 days after month end; $10 minimum | Weekly; $10 minimum by direct deposit |
| Best traffic | Search | Email, paid, social |
Commission rates: where ClickBank looks better
This is ClickBank's whole pitch, and the numbers are real. Because most of its products are digital, vendors have almost no cost per unit and can hand affiliates most of the price. 75% on a $47 e-book is $35. Amazon's rates, which we break down category by category in how much Amazon Associates pays, top out at 10% on luxury beauty and sit at 3% to 4.5% for the categories most content sites live in. A $100 kitchen appliance at 4.5% is $4.50.
So a single ClickBank sale is often worth eight to fifteen Amazon sales. If both converted at the same rate, ClickBank would win easily. They don't.
Conversion and trust: where Amazon wins
The visitor you send to Amazon already has an account, a saved card, a Prime subscription and a decade of experience buying there. They land on a product page they recognise, with reviews they trust, and buy in two clicks. Affiliate links to Amazon commonly convert at several percent of clicks, and well-targeted buyer guides do considerably better than that.
The visitor you send to a ClickBank offer lands on a vendor's sales page, usually a long-form letter or video from a company they've never heard of, asking $47 to $197 for a product they can't see. Conversion is measured in fractions of a percent for cold traffic. The gap is not a small adjustment; it's the difference between a page that earns and one that doesn't.
Amazon then gives you three things ClickBank can't. You earn on everything in the cart, so a reader who came for a $30 tent stake and also bought a $250 tent pays you on both. The products you can link are the products people are actually searching for, which is what makes search-driven content sites work. And Amazon's brand does the selling, so your content only has to get the reader to the right product, not persuade them to trust an unknown seller.
Cookies, carts and refunds
ClickBank's 60-day cookie versus Amazon's 24 hours is the comparison every ClickBank guide leads with, and it's less decisive than it looks. Amazon buyers mostly buy within hours of clicking, and anything they add to the cart in that first day stays credited to you for 90 days. The short cookie costs you some late purchases; it rarely costs you a sale that was going to happen anyway. ClickBank's long cookie mostly helps in the model it's built for, where a visitor is warmed up over weeks by email before buying.
Refunds cut the other way, and harder. ClickBank offers buyers a 60-day money-back guarantee, and in its highest-paying categories, weight loss, make-money, relationships, refund rates of 15% to 30% are normal. A refund reverses your commission. So the headline 75% is, in practice, something like 55% to 65% once the refunds clear, and your income for any given month isn't really yours for two more. Amazon's physical products are returned at low single-digit rates, and a return within its typical 30-day window also reverses the commission, but the amounts are small and the pattern is stable.
What you can promote
Amazon sells almost everything physical, which means almost any niche a content site can be about has products to review. A camping site, a coffee site, a nursery site and a home office site all have thousands of Amazon products to write about, and those products are what their readers are typing into Google.
ClickBank has around 4,000 active offers concentrated in health and fitness, make-money and business, self-help, relationships and spirituality, plus supplements. If your site is in one of those, there are offers to test. If your site is about tents, drills or espresso machines, there is very little on ClickBank to promote, and what exists will be a course loosely related to the topic. Product quality also varies enormously, and promoting a bad one costs you the trust that made the reader click in the first place.
Getting in and getting paid
Both are free and open. ClickBank lets you promote the moment you sign up, with no approval and no sales requirement. Amazon approves you provisionally on the spot but closes the account if you haven't made three qualifying sales within 180 days, which is the rule that catches sites with no traffic yet; you can reapply, but it's better to have pages ranking before the clock runs down.
ClickBank pays weekly by direct deposit once you clear a threshold you can set as low as $10. Amazon pays roughly 60 days after the end of the month a sale was made in, with a $10 minimum for direct deposit. ClickBank is faster; Amazon is slower but there's no refund window still hanging over the money when it arrives.
The math, with real numbers
Take 1,000 visitors to a page built around one product. The figures below are illustrative but in the normal range for each program.
| Amazon buyer guide | ClickBank review | |
|---|---|---|
| Visitors | 1,000 | 1,000 |
| Click to the offer | 30% → 300 | 30% → 300 |
| Conversion after the click | 5% → 15 orders | 1% → 3 sales |
| Average order / price | $120 (item plus cart) | $97 |
| Commission | 4% → $72.00 | 75% → $218.25 |
| Refunds | 3% → −$2.16 | 20% → −$43.65 |
| Net per 1,000 visitors | $69.84 | $174.60 |
On this page, ClickBank wins. That's the honest version of the case for it, and it's why experienced marketers in the right niches use it. Now look at the assumptions. The Amazon column uses a 5% conversion rate, which is ordinary for a buyer guide. The ClickBank column uses 1%, which is generous for cold search traffic to a long sales page; many affiliates see a third of that. Drop it to 0.4% and ClickBank's net falls to about $70, level with Amazon. Then remember the Amazon page had thousands of products to choose from and was built around a keyword people search; the ClickBank page had to find a keyword that both ranks and matches one of 4,000 offers, most of them in three or four niches.
The wider point is that the ClickBank result depends on the one variable you have least control over, conversion on someone else's sales page, while the Amazon result is stable and repeatable across every product you write about. A site of fifty Amazon pages earning $70 each is a business. A site of fifty ClickBank pages is fifty separate bets.
Which one should you join
Join Amazon Associates first. It wins on conversion, on cart-wide commission, on product breadth, on refund stability and on fit with search traffic, and for most niches it's the only one of the two with anything to promote. Its weaknesses, low rates, a short cookie and a 180-day sales requirement, are all things volume solves: enough pages ranking for enough buyer keywords, each built around the right products at current prices.
Add ClickBank when a digital product genuinely belongs in the content, a training course next to a gear guide, a meal plan next to a supplement review, or when you're in one of its strong niches and have a way to warm traffic up before the sale. Used that way, it's a real second income line rather than a replacement.
Either way the bottleneck is the same: coverage. A niche is fifty to a few hundred buying keywords and each one wants its own guide, review or comparison. That's what AffSERP is built for. Give it a keyword list and it pulls live Amazon product data, writes the buyer guide or review the search intent calls for, puts your Associates tag in every link, and publishes to your site; when you're ready to layer ClickBank in, its Affiliate Review tool writes the offer reviews the same way. A site that covers its niche in weeks clears Amazon's three-sale gate and then keeps earning while you decide whether ClickBank has a place on it.
FAQ
Is ClickBank or Amazon better for beginners?
Amazon. It converts more of the visitors you send, pays on the whole cart, and lets you promote what people are already searching for. ClickBank's higher percentages sit on low conversion and 15% to 30% refunds in its biggest niches, which is a hard place to learn.
Does ClickBank pay more than Amazon?
Per sale, yes, by a wide margin. Per visitor, Amazon usually pays more, because it converts several times better and refunds far less. Per visitor is the number that matters, since traffic is what you have a limited amount of.
Can I use both on the same site?
Yes. Use Amazon for physical product reviews and buyer guides, and add a ClickBank offer where a digital product genuinely fits the topic. Make sure your affiliate disclosure covers both.
How do the cookies compare?
ClickBank's is 60 days. Amazon's is 24 hours from the click, extended to 90 days for anything added to the cart in that window. Amazon's short window matters less than it sounds because most Amazon purchases from affiliate links happen within hours.
Turn a keyword list into Amazon buyer guides built from live product data, published to your site with your Associates tag in every link.
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