It’s about time! I can’t believe it took them this long to realize that recurring billing is a good thing to offer when you focus on downloadable products.

This is great news for affiliates and merchants. I expect we’ll be seeing a lot of new offerings taking advantage of the recurring billing feature.

It should be interesting to see what kind of rates merchants decide to offer on recurring billing, since the affiliate will continue to earn commissions. After all, with your standard purchase the merchant is earning for the purchase of a single item. If they want to sell more to the customer they can, but that has nothing to do with the affiliate.

But with recurring billing, the affiliate gets a commission for the duration, while the merchant has to keep things going. It’s going to be interesting to see how this balances out. Frankly, I think merchants would love to see a way to offer a higher initial commission and then lower during the subscription, but I don’t think that will happen.

However, the merchant can set up the initial price to be higher than the rebilling price. I definitely like that feature. You can set the billing frequency and how often you want to rebill - up to 99 times. That’s a nice length of time, although if you are running a membership site or similar you won’t want to set it too low. On the other hand, if you have something you want to offer of a definite duration, that’s something you could take advantage of.

This should be very nice for membership sites and such. Clickbank handles all the troubles associated with recurring billing, freeing the merchant to focus on what they’re selling. Now we’ll just have to wait and see what people come up with.

Technorati Tags: ,