Dating ebook economics: the sticker price is noise
We pulled the economics of every dating and relationship ebook in our catalog —
102 ClickBank offers — and lined up front-end price, refund window, and how much a
funnel actually bills per buyer. Two of the three dials turn out to be decoration.
$32.50median front-end price (n=96; range $4–$108)
100%of offers with refund data carry the same 60-day window (n=100)
18.3xdeepest funnel: an $11 ebook averaging $201 per sale
What the sticker price hides
ClickBank publishes what affiliates earn per sale. Divide that by the commission rate
and you get the average total order value — everything a typical buyer is billed, upsells
and rebills included. Divide that by the front-end price and you get what we call
the funnel multiple: how much the checkout actually costs relative to the
price on the sales page.
The median funnel multiple is 1.34x — but the mean is 2.42x, because the tail is long.
20 of 96 priced offers bill at least double their sticker price; 14 bill 3x or more.
Median funnel multiple by price band: 1.34x under $20, 1.33x at $20–$39, 1.34x at $40–$69, 1.33x at $70+. Flat. A higher sticker price does not mean a shallower funnel.
What does move with price is recurring billing: 40% of sub-$20 offers rebill, rising to 66% at $40 and up. Overall, 56 of 102 offers (55%) have recurring billing, and recurring offers run a higher median multiple (1.57x vs 1.33x).
Every one of the 15 deepest funnels has recurring billing attached.
The refund window, meanwhile, carries zero signal: all 100 offers with refund data show
the identical ClickBank-standard 60 days. Vendors do not compete on refund terms here —
so a "60-day money-back guarantee" on a dating ebook sales page is a platform default,
not a mark of confidence.
Price vs funnel depth, all 96 priced offers
Recurring billing (56) One-time billing (40 of 46 priced)Hover a point for the offer. Y axis is logarithmic.
Download the full dataset (CSV, 102 rows)
— one row per offer: price, refund days, gravity, earned-per-sale, commission rate,
recurring flag, computed order value and funnel multiple.
What this means for buyers
Treat the checkout page, not the sales page, as the price tag. Before entering card
details on any of these offers, look for pre-checked add-ons and "trial" language — that
is where an $11 product becomes a $201 average order. Our reviews map each funnel
individually: see His Secret Obsession,
Mend the Marriage,
The Obsession Method, and
Stealth Attraction for worked examples of
reading a funnel before you buy.
Methodology
Dataset: the 102 products in the Saltbench catalog whose ClickBank marketplace
subcategory is Marriage & Relationships (61) or Dating Guides (41), extracted from
our product records on 2026-08-24. Fields used: front-end price (listed on 96 of 102
offers), refund window (100 of 102), ClickBank gravity, average earned-per-sale, and
commission rate (all 102), and whether the offer has recurring billing.
Average order value is computed as earned-per-sale ÷ commission rate; the funnel
multiple is average order value ÷ front-end price. Both are derived from ClickBank's
own payout reporting, so they reflect what typical buyers are actually billed across
the funnel, not what we estimate. Offers missing a front-end price (6) are excluded
from price and funnel-multiple statistics and their sample sizes are stated inline.
We did not measure page counts or content quality here — this page is economics only.
The full row-level data is in the CSV above; our review process is described in the
site methodology.