CCBill Ratios: WTF?
 

Lately there have been a few threads about CCBill and their ratios. Now I'm not the type to "panic" and go ranting for no reason. I figure there are a myriad of reasons why sales can be slow, or down, and why conversion ratios may be a bit skewed. Here are a few of the most popular reasons:

Summer slowdown
free porn
recession
Wall Street/banks
It's the weekend
Poor content
Poor site management
Poor marketing skills
Lousy traffic

etc etc etc

But seriously CCBill, WTF? Last night I switch the cascade back to CCBill from Epoch. GIANT mistake! Get up this afternoon and see......2 sales with 12,500+ uniques to my best converting site. 0:10,000+ for my 2nd-best converting site. 0:8000+ for my third-best converting site. Network-wide: 70,000 uniques - 2 sales.

COME ON CCBILL THIS IS FUCKING RIDICULOUS ALREADY. If I had left the Cascade with Epoch I could've expected to see 20+ sales upon awaking. TWO??????????????????????

My sites - my successful ones - are like cash registers. Ka-ching Ka-ching Ka-ching. Like clockwork. It's how I've managed to build up my little porn empire. So when everything STOPS (on a dime) like this there is an explanation - and it concerns either CCBill or their merchant banks, or both.

I really want this nonsense STOPPED and for CCBill to stop fucking with account, putting the choke on/off, manipulating put-throughs, increasing the scrub for one sub-account while decreasing it for another so I end up always hitting the same 'average', regardless of site. Re-work your algorithm, cleanse my account, just STOP IT.

But no matter how much I threaten to take hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue away from them and either give it to another biller or go merchant account myself, CCBill doesn't seem to care. Thus, this thread.

I love the respectability and reliability of CCBill, which is why I use them and have tried for months now to correct these rollercoaster sales patterns, but numbers do not lie. I do this full-time, 24/7 (it seems) so there's absolutely NO WAY for anyone - ANYONE - to "slip something by me" when it comes to numbers, stats, sales and conversions. It's my obsession. Isn't it yours, adult webmaster?

Enough already.

My current ccbill ratio is 1:22000,so i know what you mean.

good luck waking up tomorrow with some more sales. I find it soothing to get really drunk when things like that happen then you almost don't even realize what's going on.

BTW... I'm sure Paul K could clear it up for you ;)

Good advice all around mmcfadden - drink up baby!! LOL

I'm sure PaulK will get on this. There are good people @ CCBill so this is never, ever anything "personal". Just getting a little seasick from all the rough seas. I want off this boat! :D

dude you complain alot about ccbill
how about you just use epoch and stop complaining
or maybe get a merchant account
instead of just making gfy posts DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT PLAYA

Why do you wonder?

You CANT pretend to make money selling something that is FREE..

Surfers are not stupid anymore. What was standard ratio for 2005 (1:200), is now 1:2000....

.

So why did you switch the cascade.. and is the cascade through ccbill?

if what you say is true why would you cascade back to CCBILL if Epoch converts so much better? makes no sense.

Interresting thread, I was seeing the same thing going on with ALL my ccbill sponsorsd and to be honest traffic is to precious to wasdte so I am spending the weekend dropping all sponsors that are using ccbill, atleast for now to see what happens.

also, what makes no sense, is why didn't epoch pic up the sales that ccbill (supposedly didnt) if they (epoch) was second in the cascade?

fact is it has nothing to do with CCBill or Epoch, it's the fucking market is DEAD!!!!!!!!!!!!

My affiliate program (see sig) is a CCBill affiliate program so I need CCBill to get its' act together here, for the sake of my affiliates if for no other reason. Could I switch to a merchant account or NATS? Sure - then I'd be like all the other programs who are struggling, cheating people, not paying, disappearing....no thanks.

CCBill and Epoch have differant merchant banks and accounts. Therefore, on some days I've noticed that Epoch's ratios suck while CCBill's are good, and vice versa. So I switch the cascade during times like these, and I've learned (wisdom) that when either CCBill or Epoch are pumping through sales like clockwork (as it should be) it doesn't seem to last for more than a day or two before WHAM the conversions tank. So that's when I switch the cascade. It's called "riding the hot hand", so to speak.

So Epoch was doing great - the 'good times' gotta end soon, I figure, based on months of past patterns - so I switch last night.

NEWS: I switched the cascade back to Epoch at 1:03 pm. At 3:40 pm: 4 sales.

CCBill: 12 hours, 10,000+ uniques = 2 sales
Epoch: 2 1/2 hours, 2,000+ uniques = 4 sales.

NOTHING HAS CHANGED EXCEPT THE CASCADE.

Explain.

No denials, therefore no cascade to Epoch. ALSO highly strange!
To answer your BOLD TYPE statement I refer you to my above response.

Cliff Notes: NOTHING has changed except the cascade.
CCBill: 12 hours, 10,000+ uniques = 2 sales
Epoch: 2 1/2 hours, 2,000+ uniques = 4 sales.

In the mid-afternoon on a summer Saturday.

Explain.

so you are saying anyone using a merchant account or nats is struggling, cheating, not paying, disappearing?

dude you should really wisen up a little

It's so fucking hot in the mid-Atlantic right now that nobody has energy to jerk off -- even if their air conditioner is at full blast.

I do apologize dude - that comment was obviously not directed at you.

But also, in my own defense of the offending comment: almost every single thread here on GFY regarding programs that have stopped paying, delaying payments, closing up shop are NATS programs and/or non-CCBill affiliate programs. So I'm not completely irrational in thinking NATS programs have more "issues" let's say than CCBill programs.

Very, very true (110 degrees in NYC today!) but what about International sales? West Coast sales? From my GEO-stats I can tell how many "east coast" sales are coming in and, true, not many. LOL But what Belgium?

yeah, what ABOUT Belgium, hmmm?

Now that is a just a dumb statement.

Hahaha I thought about that last week during the heatwave, it doesn't help sales for sure :1orglaugh

Run them together if you think you're having problems...

sales don't come in regular intervals
for example, say you get 24 sales in one day
do you really think they will come in 1 every hour?

no they don't

you might go 5 hours with no sales then 4 sales in one hour, and the next 6 hours you might get only 2 sales, then the next 2 hours get 6 sales

sometimes i've gotten 6 sales in one hour with 1000 uniques

You think all of a sudden my site magically converted 5 times better for that one hour?

No, It's called averaging.

The smaller slice of time you analyze the more MEANINGLESS it all means.

You are experiencing the same thing everyone else is. :2 cents:

Cheers,
BV
:upsidedow

maybe your sites suck.

Well BV, you make excellent points (as usual), and if I'm experiencing the same things everyone else is then I guess misery loves company, to some extent. LOL

I do understand about 'averages' - this rant is NOT about my bank account - but my concern is more about affiliates, and making sure the CCBill side of things is running smoothly.

I mean, I come on here all the time saying "promote my sites!!" and if an affiliate does, during one of these 'unexplainable' days and they get weird ratios, then I've lost that affiliate.

On another note: are you saying if i didn't switch the cascade these last 3 hours now those 4 sales would be CCBill sales?

Alternately: what do YOU do when you see 10,000 uniques with only 2 sales for a 1:5000 ratio? Just shrug it off and go fishing? If so, I wish I had your life! LOL

Hmmm....
 

Well the Big Boob matket must just rock then... Our sites were converting 1/150 in BETA and even now with more affiliates on board we're doing 1/200 ish...

I dont get these 1/22,000... sorry but either the traffic is horrendous or the sites are... :Oh crap

Before raising the alarm bells, here is what you should have done.

You can test your theory, sort of : Run 1 week with CCBill --> Cascade --> Epoch, then just CCBill. Make a simple charge compariing your traffic patterns to your sales. Switch back to nornal for 1 week, then switch again. You need alot more than 24 hour's worth of data to get anything close to a clear picture and even then you would still be guessing.

Here's how to solve your problem. Install NATS and plug-in as many different billers as you can. Compare the sales and declines of each biller for a period of 6 months, but be sure to deduct all of the CHARGEBACKS from each biller so that you are only counting the true sales. If each biller provides roughly the same amount of sales, drop the ones which charge the most and keep the ones with the lowest pre-transaction rate.

gone fishin

Hi BittieBucks, I have a question for you.

Your sig says "Bittie Bucks - Upto 70% Revshare - CCBill Cascading Program - 10% Webmaster Referral"

70% + 10% plus CCBill's 14.5% + their 5% holdback = 99.5%. How do you make money pocketing only 5 cents on the dollar?

btw your instant credit card access button doesnt work in firefox
here http://www.ilovebitties.com/join.html
all other sites worked so you might want to get this fixed

must be 70% after the processing fees

Thank you for some serious advice!

To quickly respond: This isn't a "knee-jerk reaction" on my part. I've been exploring and investigating this situation since january of 2010. I would ONLY come onto a public board as a last resort. When I call CCBill Support all they can do is a run a test transaction. They don't (or can't) see what's happening internally, on the back end, where algorithms and scripts rule the day. plus, my CCBill rep hasn't responded to my last 4 emails for over a month now. So what to do? Take it like a little bitch? heh

But your advice about running NATS and 'testing' billers may be exactly the next step. Thanks again. :)

I will Answer Your Question...
 

Ok here goes... first off not every sale will be via a referred affiliate, so far out of all the affiliates we have only 1 has been referred by another webmaster...

Secondly it says upto, we have a tiered system that rewards the affiliate for the volume of sales he sends, this is tiered at 50-55-60-65 and 70%... this means the affiliates sending the larger amount of sales can earn a bigger %... to achieve 70% they need to send us a 100 sales, the 70% is paid on subsequent sales (not the 100 to get to that tier) And to be fair if an affiliate can send us 100 sales in a month, then he is more than welcome to the profit after that...

Furthermore we try and monitorise the members in other ways, VOD, Webcam Networks, Upsells ect... We are hoping once we've been running for 6 months and we can see the per member value we will be in a position to up the base rate of the revshare to 60% and also introduce a real PPS non dependant on dubious cross sales...

Hope that answered your question, if not feel free to hit me up on ICQ :thumbsup

"Summer slowdown": i never had a "summer slowdown"

Hey...
 

Hey Steve thanks we'll take a look into that :( My design guy has had a few little glitches with certain explorers... we thought we picked up most of them in BETA, but a couple obviously sneaked through :(

Also in regards to your other question... we 100% pay the processing fees, it's not split with the affiliates... :thumbsup

Isn't there a way you can code in a "switch" that will monitor the conversion ratios and if it hits a certain bad number it will automatically switch to Epoch and vice versa?

Would you go away already? It's like going to a Lakers game and yelling at all the Lakers fans. No one cares what you have to say about the state of adult business.

I think thats 3 cents actually :upsidedow

Im not saying anything.. the market is telling in your face.. thats why your sales suck and your traffic is going down every single day..

.

Crap dude, Firefox is used by 36% of my traffic, so you've been essentially leaving 30-40% of your potential sales confused and sent away? I would be hella pissed at someone lol.

You're saying a whole lot all over threads on here just trying to stir shit up.

My sales don't suck, maybe YOUR adult sales do? I don't have a single sponsor above 1:1000 and the good ones are around 1:200-1:300. Buzz off.

Congratulations on your success! Way to go! But I would make that 100 sales a WEEK before giving them 70%, but that's just me. :)


Excellent point. Something I'm looking into but since i run 22 paysites, a Program (PeabodyCash), an entire Network plus a zillion other things, I would prefer for this setup to WORK rather than me spending time & effort writing scripts, installing software, etc etc. Heh, I'm a Dreamer. :D

I have checked and we are unaware of any problems on our end that would be causing your issue with sales. I can guarantee that we are not modifying your settings or making any changes that would cause you to not receive sales, that really would not make sense for us to do. I can however symphathize with your concerns and we would like to help you the best that we can.

We spoke about your account last week and I sent you an email yesterday but perhaps not to the correct address. Please shoot me an email so we can pick up where we left off.

Hi Paul! Good to hear from you, and sorry to bother you on a Saturday.

I actually did not receive an email from you yesterday. I will send one now and we can discuss all this. :)

How would they benefit from scrubbing sales or something anyways? Unless they were somehow hiding sales from you and keeping all the money I don't see how it would be in their best interest to put a temporary halt on sales.. maybe the processing isn't working as good as it should sometimes yeah but intentionally screwing with your sales wouldn't help anyone.

try making one tube, i saw people are saying rations are like 99 :D

Dude, you keep repeating shit like this and it's fucking stupid. Anyone that gets more than a couple of sales per day knows that sales don't come in evenly. We are all aware of how averages work and we know that you can't test small amounts of data effectively.

You know what else we as thinking webmasters know? That CCBill does this shit all the fucking time. There were people bitching about this in 2002, 2003 and 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. The OP is not some pissant with 300 uniques per day. He quite clearly listed his traffic stats in the first post and if you can't deduce that he has enough data at his fingertips to draw some conclusions then something is wrong with YOU.

I started promoting CCBill sponsors in 2003 and the handful of sites I chose converted like crazy. A few weeks later, NOTHING. Not almost nothing, absolutely fucking nothing. tens of thousands of uniques per day and not a fucking sale for days at a time. Guess what? Other webmasters started bitching at the same time. Guess what else? CCBill reps NEVER find a God damned problem. They run a test transaction and say 'everything is fine on this end'. Oh, and during this time my webcam signups remained exactly the same as they had been. People lose 90% to 100% of their CCBill sales but other sponsors are OK. You somehow think this is the normal? This scenario has played out hundreds (thousands?) of times right here on GFY. You can search through the history and find out for yourself.

If you have as much traffic as you pretend to have then you know that sales can not dip so dramatically for no fucking reason. Very rarely does everyone on earth just quit buying porn at the same fucking time. The guy that liked jerking it to big titties last week still likes it this fucking week as well. CCBill is the absolute worst. I stopped promoting anything related to them in 2004 and judging by the multiple threads I've seen here THIS MONTH I will not test them out again.

You talking out of your ass and muddying the conversation with bullshit doesn't help anything and it doesn't make you look smart. Quite the opposite.

Just jumping in to say that Today have been The Best day, saleswise, for me Ever! I even had a couple of ccbill sales :)
About sales/no sales, For one sponsor I have, I steady made 1-4 sales every day for the last periods. This period (from 16th) I have made 1 sale. Today. So, it goes up and down, up and down.... Today is a Up day ;)

I agree totally with you. I guess it's either a natural reaction assume a 'complainer" (me) is accusing someone (CCBill) of "screwing" them intentionally..

This is NOT what I am saying.

So let me be clear, because perhaps I was not earlier:

CCBill - or ANY biller - wants to make as much $ as we do. So yes, it is entirely in their best interest to "put through" as many transactions as possible, so that everyone "wins". I agree. But if CCBill - or ANY biller - gets notcie from their merchant banks that they (the biller) needs to 'slow down" the pit-throughs for, say, 12-36 hours, because of X,Y & Z, then IN THAT MOMENT it's actually in CCBill's - or ANY biller's - interests to NOT put-through as many transactions as possible. Better to hear some short-term compalints from account holders than to lose (or piss off) a merchant bank that's the foundation of your business.

So what I seek is clarification. IF the above is at all remotely true then I, as someone who depends (and expects) a certain level of consistency (based on months of averages, BV), deserve to know WTF is going on, just so I don't go posting threads like these on GFY.

I'm tired of being a psychic, scouring over Wall Street reports, trying to figure out if it's going to be a "good" day or a "bad" day, based on situations beyond my control. Help a brother out and gimme a freakin' clue every once in a while. LOL

Have you ever, in all of the thousands of tests, found 1 problem with CCBill? This is the same song and dance everyone went through with Corvette years ago.

I have no probem with BV (and very few others here on GFY) but thanks for your post. I see (and have seen) those same GFY threads, too. I know what time it is, as they say on the streets of NYC. I understand how CCBill - and ANY biller - operates, what their concerns are, their liabilities, etc. I guess I'm just hoping my business will get some needed attention and some of these ratio issues can level off. But again, I'm a Dreamer. :D

If CCBIll had told me many years ago "We have to crank up the scrub, chargebacks are out of hand" I would have never pulled a link. That is never the case though, nothing is ever wrong. I was converting 1:250 steadily then it dropped to at first 0 sales in tens of thousands of hits then 1:20,000 conversions not long after. I can't sit around playing games with people that only give me 10% of the information I need.

What's a pit-through? I don't see how it would be wise for the bank to turn away sales for the same reason ccbill shouldn't lol.

But if there's a lot of chargebacks happening and they have to somehow cut down on that then I guess they would have to turn away sales? Shit.

Hey Jakes...
 

Oh trust me the designer will be indeed getting his butt kicked ! He was suppose to have tried the sites out on all the different platforms... I guess it's best we catch it now before we really open the floodgates this week... but agreed FireFox has a large % of the browser traffic :thumbsup

A "pit-through" is Mister Peabody being a bad typist. LOL
With all the credit issues and new regs that banks are going through, and all the 'normal' games they play, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if banks were juggling as fast as they could, to keep this whole house of cards from tumbling down (yes, mixed metaphor).

Which leads me to...

...fucking EXACTLY. Well said. :)

Well...
 

Bit early for congratulations but they are appreciated :thumbsup We're a new start up program so we're in the process of getting people to give us a go... early signs are promising and conversions are good... I am sure it will become waltered down when more affilites and traffic come on board... but definetly very contented at the moment

Good luck with your ventures too mate :thumbsup

Fiddy CCBill explanations!