Dirty_DS,
I can assure you that nothing is amiss. There have been no global changes in sales velocity
As far as your sales go, we had a brief discussion about them earlier this week (perhaps late last week, I don?t recall, I was out of town the majority of the week).
There are factors other than the billing company that can affect sales. It is a matter of troubleshooting to find the failure, if one can be found. I continuously stress this; if you think that something is wrong, test it out for yourself. There are many things that can be looked at. I continue to fail to understand why the blame always seems to default to the billing company. You can get a good idea if there is an issue with the processor by testing it?all it takes is a few seconds, see for yourself. In addition, most webmasters have a range of tools/stats are at their fingertips to troubleshoot the issue on their own:
- Have your traffic patterns/sources changed?
- Is the ratio of hits to your front page vs. hits to the pre-signup page changed?
- Have your declines suddenly increased dramatically?
?just to name a few off of the top of my head
Who knows, the demographics of the type of people that join your site can be coming from an area that is having network issues.
One more thing and this is from my own personal thoughts and experience. I liken some situations to a bell curve. One a particular day, or week, a small percentage of webmasters have unusually good day, and a small percentage of webmasters have an unusually bad day, with the majority having a day that deviates little from normal sales. Same concept applies affiliates.
You can test what you can, and get a good idea of what is working and what isn?t, but face it, if you ask most site owners, you will see that sales are not always consistent. You might have a great week, and the next week be not so great?like anything else in any business or industry