Both resell your product to the buyer, run the checkout and pay your affiliates, and they cost about the same per sale: 7.9% + $1 on Digistore24's US entity and 7.5% + $1 on ClickBank.
The difference is where you sell and how you start. Digistore24 is free to join and its European entities handle VAT for buyers there. ClickBank charges $49.95 once, pays weekly or every two weeks, and says it has far more active affiliates. Plenty of vendors list on both.
This comparison is for vendors choosing where to list a product. We make ElasticFunnels, which supports Digistore24 and ClickBank as merchants, so every fact about them below comes from Digistore24's and ClickBank's own help centers, opened on 19 October 2026. If you promote offers as an affiliate, the ClickBank affiliate integration is the page for you.
Digistore24 vs ClickBank at a glance
| For vendors | Digistore24 (US entity) | ClickBank |
|---|---|---|
| Who sells to the buyer | Digistore24, as reseller | ClickBank, as retailer |
| Fee per sale | 7.9% + $1 (9.9% + $1 above 1% chargebacks) | 7.5% + $1 |
| To start | Free to register | $49.95 once, at the first approved product |
| Refund fee | $0.75 or $1 | $0.50 or $1 |
| When you're paid | Up to four dates a month (7th, 14th, 21st, 28th) | Fridays, weekly or every two weeks |
| Cost per payout | $2.50 by US PayPal or ACH, $40 by international wire | $5.00 |
| Held back | 10% of earnings for 60 days | Not described in the fee article |
| Buyer refund window | 60, 90 or 180 days, your choice | 60 days by default; 30 to 90 days, your choice |
| Selling in Europe | Separate EU, UK and Irish entities handle it | Click Sales, Inc. is the retailer everywhere |
Sources: Digistore24 costs and payout dates; ClickBank fees, payouts and refund periods.
Fees on a $100 sale
On a $100 sale, Digistore24 Inc. keeps $8.90 and ClickBank keeps $8.50. Over a year of sales that 40-cent gap matters less than the fixed costs around it: ClickBank's $49.95 activation and $5 per payout, Digistore24's payout fee by method, and what each charges per refund and chargeback.
Watch the chargeback line on Digistore24. Its fee rises to 9.9% + $1 once chargebacks pass 1% of sales, and each chargeback costs $50, or $40 when its prevention service catches it. On a high-ticket offer with paid traffic, that rate decides more of your margin than the base fee.
When Digistore24 and ClickBank pay you
- Digistore24 pays on the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th, and you choose which dates. The minimum is 50 on the 7th and 200 on the others. 90% of a sale's earnings becomes payable two weeks after the sale (30 days on products above 300 euros), and 10% is held for 60 days as a security deposit. It pays companies only.
- ClickBank pays on Fridays: weekly with direct deposit, otherwise every two weeks, once you pass the payment threshold. Each payment costs $5.
For a new vendor, ClickBank's weekly schedule gets the first money in sooner. With Digistore24, plan your ad budget around the two-week delay and the 10% that comes back two months later.
Approval and affiliates
ClickBank's Business Services team reviews a new seller's product and answers within 3 to 5 business days, and asks for a Certificate of Insurance. Digistore24 approves each product too, separately for each of its reseller entities you sell through, along with your marketplace entry.
Affiliates reach you differently. On ClickBank, most marketplace offers can be promoted right away, without a request. On Digistore24, an affiliate requests a partnership, which you accept by hand or automatically. On size, ClickBank's own comparison page claims about 22,500 active affiliates against about 3,000 for Digistore24, and about $6.6 billion in commissions paid against $3 billion. Those are a competitor's numbers, so read them as ClickBank's view; Digistore24 itself says it has processed over 3 billion euros in sales.
Selling to Europe
This is where the two differ most. Digistore24 sells through four entities: a German GmbH, a US Inc., a UK Ltd and an Irish one. The US entity sells to buyers everywhere except the EU, the UK, Switzerland and Norway, which the European entities cover, and the reseller handles VAT and invoicing for the buyer's country. You sign a contract with each reseller you use.
If a real share of your buyers is in Germany, France or the rest of Europe, that setup is the main reason to choose Digistore24. If your traffic is mostly the US and other English-speaking countries, ClickBank's larger affiliate base usually counts for more.
Refund windows
ClickBank's default return window is 60 days, and sellers can set their own between 30 and 90 days, or longer with Support's approval. On Digistore24's US entity you pick 60, 90 or 180 days, and you can still refund outside it. Either way, the window you pick is the one your affiliates' commissions stay exposed to, so set it with your real refund rate in mind.
Which should you choose?
- Choose Digistore24 if you sell to Europe, want to start without a setup fee, or want refund windows up to 180 days.
- Choose ClickBank if your buyers are mostly in the US, you want weekly payouts, or you want the marketplace that says it has the larger crowd of active affiliates.
- Run both if you can carry two approvals. The sales pages and upsell pages are yours on both, so one funnel can serve buyers on each.
Weighing JVZoo as well? JVZoo vs ClickBank compares it on the same terms, and the Digistore24 review goes deeper on Digistore24 alone.
Digistore24 and ClickBank as merchants in ElasticFunnels
Both take the order on their own checkout. In ElasticFunnels you add each as a merchant, build the pages in front of their checkout once, and see which merchant, page and affiliate each sale came from:
- Buy tags that follow the merchant. A
[BUY=]tag becomes the checkout link of the merchant set on that domain, so you can move a domain from one merchant to the other, or give each its own domain, and keep the page. - ClickBank Pitch Flow. Enter the Pitch Flow ID on the funnel and swap the page behind a funnel node without re-approving the pitch flow. The ClickBank funnel tutorial walks through it.
- Digistore24 IPN with a click ID. Buy links carry the visitor's click ID as
ds24tr, and payments, refunds, chargebacks, missed rebill payments and cart abandons come back by IPN, with an optional SHA passphrase. - One report for both. Sales from either merchant by traffic source, page, split-test variant and affiliate, with split tests of up to 5 variants under one URL.
Setup for each merchant is on the Digistore24 vendor integration and the ClickBank vendor integration pages.
- Look at where your traffic lands before you look at fees. Forty cents per $100 rarely decides this; a third of your buyers sitting in Europe does.
- Count the deposit as cash you don't have. On Digistore24, 10% of every sale comes back two months later, which hurts most in the month you scale ads.
- Set the same refund window on both if you run both, so your guarantee reads the same on every page.
- Track which merchant each sale came through. Two dashboards that each look fine can hide that one of them carries most of your refunds.
Digistore24 and ClickBank are closer than their marketing suggests. Pick by your buyers' countries and your cash flow, and keep the funnel your own so you can add the other one later.
