If you’re a Internet affiliate that promoting Clickbank products, you will probably notice that there is a 90-day refund policy for each product.

Refunds can kill your Clickbank sales efforts! Lots of sales means nothing if your referred customers request their money back.

Refunds can not totally be avoided. What you need is to choose the best products when you start promoting. Calculating the refund rate of the Clickbank product that you want to promote is a good way to decide if it is worth your time and efforts.

Take a look at the Clickbank Market Place, and you will be provided with some important payout stats for each product. Every product at Clickbank has some information attached to it, which can help you determine whether it is a quality product for affiliates to sell or not.

%/sale: How much you earn as a percentage of the total price of the product, the commission rate.

$/sale ($Earned/Sale): The average net amount earned per affiliate per referred sale in the past considering refunds and the Clickbank fees. With this number, you can have an inner look at the real performance of the products you want to promote.

The average refund rate of a Clickbank product is: (Affiliate Commission – $/sale)/ Affiliate Commission = Average Refund Rate

Affiliate Commission= (Product Price – Product Price * 7.5% -$1) * %/sale

For example, you check the Clickbank marketplace and see the price of Confessions of a Lazy Super-Affiliate report is $29.95, $Earned/Sale is 19.97, and the commission rate is 75%. So the affiliate commission of this report is 75% * (29.95-29.95 * 7.5%-1) =$20.03 and the refund rate is (20.03-19.97) / 20.03 =0.29%. Yeah, it’s one of the lowest refund products I have ever seen.

The average refund rate of Clickbank products is around 10%. With a 5% or less refund rate congratulations you find an excellent product. With an 20-25% (or higher) refund rate you should consider promoting other ones.

And you should notice that you can’t calculate the refund rate with any accuracy if a Clickbank vendor is selling different products with different prices. I will tell you how to check if this vendor has multiple products. Type payment URLs like this in your browser: http://1.vendor.pay.clickbank.net/, http://2.vendor.pay.clickbank.net/… If you get a 404 error on http://2.vendor.pay.clickbank.net then this merchant has only one product in the Clickbank marketplace.

Another factor is when vendors change their product price. Realize that if a merchant offers different products/price this isn’t going to work.