My State of the Industry Report (chargebacks+refunds)/sales
 

Chargebacks and refunds percentage by year:
(chargebacks + refunds) / initial sales

Year : Per % (primary source of traffic)
------------------------------------------------------
2004 : .0035 (tgp traffic)
2005 : .0093 (newsgroups/tgp/blogs)
2006 : .0114 (SEO/blogs)
2007 : .0123 (SEO/blogs)
2008 : .0225 (SEO/blogs)
2009 : .0169 (SEO/blogs)
2010 : .0210 (SEO/blogs)
2011 : .0361 (SEO/blogs)


2011:

Jan .017
Feb .018
Mar .048
Apr .013
May .012
Jun .017
Jul .058
Aug .018
Sep .060
Oct .030
Nov .070

The difference? Most sponsors now have prechecked cross sales. I have noticed a trend in the last 6 months that it is getting worse. No other year has a month with more than .036 percent for an "off" month. Yet, this year 4 months did.

I wonder what the future holds....

Good to know its not just me.

What I find amusing are the self righteous twits who despise a company for allegedly "carding" and then turn around and slap pre-checked cross sales on their sites trying to lure and trap surfers with false charges.

Now dat's funny.

Not.

.


.

Ours is worse,

We run solo teen, girl next door sites etc ala www.totalsupercuties.com
We have been targeted by dating site scammers,ghana scammers, nigerian, skype, yahoo, phone sex you name it.

It's to the point now we monitor every sale and run a number of checks against the ip address. We have seriously gotten 30 chargbacks in a single day.

We get so many reports of our content being used to scam people we have added disclaimers on contact pages requesting to not be contacted; and websites themselves.

It's going to put us under with ccbill if we can't stop it. They use proxies vpn's tor network. We instantly void all girl names none affiliated; affiliated we check out the ip's and look for fraud of course. None of these sales are affiliated it's a direct clue that it's a scam sale in our case. They directly type the domain into the browser scam us grab some girls content and do the daily scam with it.

HEY CCBILL:

Oh on another note: some of these scammers know they can post directly to you removing any sort of pre security. We need a better system I would suggest like internal sessions
ie used by moneybookers.com it's a postback system on the presale to verify values. It's a safer way to assure the post is coming from your customer.

Ccbill refuses to obviously use common rbl's?; like ones maintained by efnet(irc service) these can offer great clues into the ip address. You have a certain amount of time to void a charge and hence controll your cb ratio.

It's out of control industry wide and I think we are basicly all screwed. We have given away to much; first with TGP's thanks Steve :), then tubes, fileshare, now lockers our sutff is stolen to the point it's going to cause the death of the industry.

Ps i'm a systems programmer and i'm need of work, well close.. :(

Your data is only small slice of the pie but youve had a chargeback/transaction ratio of over 1% every year since 2006, thats high. Is this data from sponsors with merchant accounts?

Man, at that point I think I'd hand over all of my content instead of piling up 30 chargebacks, stop canceling their account if they are causing that much trouble.

By the way, your bottom link is broken, just links back to the homepage.

What volume are you talking about with this sample? 100s sales, 1000s 10000s 100000s? Is volume consistent each year? Are the sites the same? Ie if you went from promoting twistys to media revenue obviously you'd see that.

Sucks to see that but The stats on their own are meaningless without more Information

Well... The high ratio is created by 8 sponsors...

.036 They stopped updating all of their sites and got bought by the people below
.013 They don't post here anymore
.089 Ex-GF sponsor
.054 Well known, highly regarded teen sponsor that has only 1 site still updating
.140 Well known, highly regarded sponsor with SEO traffic
.142 Ex-GF sponsor that stopped paying affiliates earlier this year.
.033 CCBILL (see the problems above)
.029 Teen sponsor that uses prechecked x-sales


I have plenty like Brain Cash that look like this:

Sales: Rebills : charge/refund

1:2:.01

I have read in many places that 1% is a very acceptable ratio when refunds are factored in which they are in this case.

Remove refunds and it is like:

.029 -> .017
.013 -> .004
.036 -> .0001

A lot of it is refunds once they go from $1 charge to $79.95 even after they canceled... Probably because they didn't notice the pre-checked x-sale on the cancellation form that was also beneath the fold!

Individual programs sales in the 1000's.

Anyone have such type of data for cam programs only?
Cams should not do prechecked cross sales and it is a different thing. For our own cam site, the cb ratio it is stable, same of 2010, but our affiliates are a few as invite only so this keeps safe and small, I wondered the big cam programs.

The problem is credit cards. They were never made for usage on the internet in the first place and Visa/MasterCard don't give a shit about fraud because it doesn't cost them anything. Solution: give people huge discounts when wiring the payment to you. In Europe we have Direct Debit. Can't be charged back and many clients prefer it too because they don't have to give anyone their credit card details. I'm now offering one year subscriptions for 100 euro/year paid by bank wire/transfer/direct debit only and it actually works. You also keep out the content thieves; they will hardly ever pay for content let alone transfer money to you from their own bank account, because they want to remain anonymous.