For Those Who Use Merchant Accounts Over 3rd Party Processers: A Question:
 

How do you handle the customer and affiliate side of things? Customer support, passwords, sending out checks, etc?

Basically what I'm asking is what do you do to replace what a CCBill, Epoch etc can do for you in terms of backend stuff and dealing with Members issues? And, at the end of the day, is it 'worth it' doing everything yourself?

Thanks all!

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh :1orglaugh:

Why would you want to replace 3rd party billers? Blaming them for your yo yo ratios and days with 0 sales is a conspiracy theory

6 months now and counting without a single day of 0 sales since we grew a set and dropped the ass hats

hope that answers your questions about affiliates and backend stuff...happy summer

get a merchant account, buy your own traffic and never look back

We use Netbilling, Epoch, GXbill for processing and NATS for member management and cascading billing.

Netbilling provides a 1-800 number for us and they handle a lot of support for us for a very reasonable transaction cost. We also use Zendesk via http://yankssupport.com for additional customer support.

As far a checks go, you simple export a file from NATS into Quickbooks or any comparable product and print your checks up via any home printer.

We fight our own chargebacks when possible and do quite well in recovering them with minimal effort.

Totally worth it in my opinion. Hit me up on ICQ if you have any other questions.

I already have the affiliate program in place (CCBill) so really the question is doing what CCBill already does for me. Thanks for the info, very helpful! :)


I just may do that, thanks for the info!! :)

Good info Todd. Hope you guys are well!

Thanks for the plug and great info Todd.

Mr. Peabody, we are happy to help. We can handle everything for you except for affiliate payouts because we never touch your $$. You can use Webmasterchecks that works well with us, or export to quickbooks and cut your own checks.

Want to see walkthrough of our system and get all of your questions answered?

Thanks, Mitch

Was going to say this as well, Netbilling customer support add on to their gateway service, or even stand alone (some merchant accounts will require you to use their gateway) is awesome. In some capacity I have been dealing with them for over 10 years, and they are VERY good.

Just don't count on the % you give up being a lot less, processing rate, transaction fees, gateway fees, they all add up.

The upside is more that you have much greater control over your risk management, what you scrub, etc.

Typically I have seen better ratios with own merchant accounts, but the work involved is much more

Benefits to using an IPSP

No single solution works for everyone, so you must consider your business model and determine what will work best for you. Ideally you want the solution that makes you the most money, relieves the most stress, enables you to focus on building your business, and provides longevity.

With Epoch, you are able to accept a lot more payment types than you could with your own merchant account. Currently we are accepting about 40 different payment types. Depending on how much international traffic you have, alternative payment types can increase sales as much as 10% to 20%.

As an Epoch client, you have the ability to trade traffic with other programs in the form of cross sells. We provide a number of ways you can do this.

There is a considerable advantage to using an IPSP who has an enormous database of fraud information and analysis to protect your account. From the so called "friendly fraud" to deliberate fraud and even fraudulent affiliates.

By using an IPSP you shift the risks of a personal merchant account in a high risk merchant category code to an established IPSP who specializes in this type of processing.

A risk management team monitors your sales and manages your portfolio to ensure you remain within card association thresholds for credits and chargebacks, domestic and foreign.

Epoch provides 24/7/365 support to your customers in virtually every language by phone, chat, and email.

Epoch provides its clients with cutting edge payment forms and other features such as our latest release, Logo GPS. Our Smart Payment Forms are custom generated for each transaction and address each customer in their language, the currency of their location, and with payment options popular in their region.

Epoch does not charge any type of reserve withholding or security deposit. You keep more of your money from day one.

You don't need to have perfect credit to use an IPSP.

You have a personal account representative that you can contact with any questions you may have about your account.

We provide 24/7/365 technical support should you have a problem with your password scripts or billing issues.


Should anyone have any questions for us, feel free to contact me. I'm happy to help.

Rand, I added you on ICQ but couldn't find you online so I'll post here instead - could I use epoch with a corporation outside of EU/US (Belize)?

we have had a merchant account for about 14 years, as for cust. service, netbilling has a call center you can use, sending out checks, use quick books or quicken. Easier to catch affiliate fraud when you can see it all in front of you.

is having control of your own business worth it...yes

Thanks much for being a client of ours for so many years!

Currently, we can only accept merchants who are located in the US or the EU.

Thanks Todd! All the best to you both. Come visit us in LA or lets meet up at a show??

Mitch

Wow, this is actually a good GFY thread!!!

Agreed. Questions anyone?

I've been doing my research and have heard excellent things about NETbilling. But I also hear excellent things about Epoch (thanks Rand!!).

What I am planning is a real world 'test' once my new affiliate program/accounts are in place. There will be announcements, threads on GFY, advertising, etc etc. The way I have things setup now all my sites are connected via one network so any price changes or billing changes I would want to try would have to be made network-wide, across 36 paysites. Instead I'd rather try these tests using only some of my sites as guinea pigs and this will be the case shortly. :)

Thanks for all the great feedback (especially Mitch and Rand)!

I may be able to help as well.

- Sliiing can work as stand alone affiliate program as well.
- We handle all your affiliates payouts for you.
- We are easy to instal, easy to use.
- No need of a second dedicated server only to host our software
- We will soon have a Sliiing 100% hosted version
- As you allready know, we can work in conjunction with your current CCBill affiliate program as well. The switch for your affiliates is then totally painless, they use exactly the same CCBill links, nothing to change on their end.

You are welcome and look forward to serving you.

Mitch