missed it by one hoss... fiddy

The official GFY umpire says you be wrong. haha! You owe me a beer. :) or do I owe you one? SOMEbody's gotta be drinkin'.

Of course we have. You cannot be in business as long as CCBill without having some issues. That being said, it is our business to limit any issues that would cause our clients and ultimately us a drop in revenue.

Corvette and I have always offered to put through tests on our own credit cards when clients see times of abnormally low sales and that offer still stands today. If there is a problem with a clients setup or our systems in general we want to know about more than anyone else I am sure!

It's not about a problem, it's most likely due to varying scrub settings. Since this is all kept hush hush expect much commentary from your customers or affiliates promoting your customers.

lol, I'm not even going to respond to this post.

Yes IMO those 4 would be CCBill sales.

and yes now I just shrug it off and wait, and inevitably things will pick up and even be awesome for a while.

It has been like this for over 10 years. The only difference between now and back then is the ratios are 10 times worse.

There's nothing to say. You keep saying that this happens all the time and it does. There is a reason for it though. Do you promote anything that isn't CCBill? When one entire processor stops converting for dozens of different sites but all the other ones are OK it is a red flag that only an idiot would ignore.

Well BV, all i can say then is: "Must be great to be BV." LOL

I have no idea how you run your business so apologies up front, but I am responsible not just for my own "bottom line" but for many others as well. Model splits, partners, affiliates, etc, to think about/fight for. When a model - who has grown dependent on the hundreds or thousands she receives weekly - calls me complaining that her sales are down 40% for this pay period and now she can't blah blah blah what do i do? Shrug it off? Go fishing?

Then I get complaints from affiliates: dude, I sent you four thousand hits last week and got X # of sales; did the same yesterday and got jack shit. WTF?

And then my business partners go: where's my ROI motherfucker?

And the models leave or stop updating their sites, and the affiliates stop sending traffic, and my business partners kick the shit out of me...

Dominos falling, one by one, with the last gigantic one crashing down and flattening
ol' Mister P. No thanks.

FUCK YOU PAY ME!

On a sunnier note: CCBill Paul wrote me, and while I won't disclose a private conversation in public, let's just say he's going to look into things for me on Monday. That's very much appreciated Paul, thank you.

Again, excellent point. Very well said indeed.

There is nothing on monday said to you that you don't already know. Try this, send to epoch and cascade to ccbill for exactly 30 days... then send to ccbill and cascade to epoch for exactly 30 days. Post results in this thread in exactly 60 days :)

Not sure how you do that though will affiliate traffic unless you have a decent amount of self generated traffic that allows those flips.

That's some great advice there (comin' from Philly). The issues with that are these:

I do model splits - 50/50 - but Epoch doesn't pay models directly. So I'd have to cut them a check. Many models are international, speak poor English, are from Alabama, etc so there's a trust issue + a PITA issue (Pain In The Ass).

But as for affiliates: If the cascade is switched to Epoch and a CCBill affiliate makes the sale, that affiliate gets paid by CCBill. So there'd better be enough coin in the piggy bank to pay that affiliate (rebills). For 30 days that would be a real hit. Last I heard, this was May I think, CCBill was looking into ways to pay the affiliates that cascade from Epoch in a differant way. Have to follow up on that.

My pleasure. Have you also called your sales rep at CCBill? It's in their best interest to make sure you're happy of course so maybe call them and explain the problem - I'm pretty sure they will help you out, and can do more than a tech support person could I think too.

Cheers!

Thanks for the explanation.

poor guys....

For legal reasons, CCBill or any other large company is never going to tell you such a thing.

However since you know that, and it's the only real plausible explanation, why would you pull your links? Like CCBill can't charge the customer and make a password for the user and not credit the sale.. So it's just they were deciding for whatever strategic reason to decline people for a time.

If that's a necessary part of CCBill's business to be in this business processing for us, then I guess that's the way it's gotta be. Doesn't sound like it's in CCBill's best interests either, but they take the bitter pill. It happens to be shared with you, so it's kind of like giving you roofies or slipping you acid or maybe... ex lax. ;)

Seems like a wink and a nod to me, just have to be paying attention. :)

I don't promote anyone, only my stuff.

But I have talked to dozens of my affiliates, from TGP guys to Review Site affiliates and everyone has ups and downs. I usually hit up a few of them when things get real bad and usually they are experiencing the same thing. On ALL their sponsors. (epoch ccbill nats mpa3, a big variety of sponsor programs)

Furthermore, I also talk to other program owners. (non ccbill ones) One on one, not on the boards. And I hear the same shit. Tough times.

Remember, most sponsors aren't going to come on here and tell you the truth, it's not good for their big pimpin reputation.

Same with allot of board warrior affiliates that are trying uphold a hotshot board persona.

Just remember what Benjamin Franklin said: ?Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see.?

I don't mean to come off sounding like I'm great. Because I'm not great. In fact I'm about burnt out on this shit. I'm just trying to tell you that you can't worry about the shit too much because it's going to drive you crazy.

I was just like you at one time. Along with many others. Comparing stats , wondering how there can be missing blanks for hours. If I didn't get so many sales in so many hours I was pulling my hair out thinking something was fucked up. But after 12 years of this shit you get used to it.

huh? enough coin in the piggy bank to pay that affiliate? what's the difference which processor processed the sale? the affiliate gets 50/60% whether it was processed by CCBILL or Epoch and CCBILL pays out the affiliate. I have no idea about how the mechanics of the arrangement between CCBILL and Epoch work.

not sure what you're saying here, i want to know because I do plan on using CCBILL and Epoch is a cascade using CCBILL's affiliate backend. Maybe there's something I'm not aware of - CCBILL told me it was simple.

Agreed.

Honestly though for me... and I work with a wide range of processors, sites, etc...

I thought someone killed the internet today... mind you I got up late... missed morning wood... and been on cam 15 days straight (they prolly all ran out of money lol).

I really need to take a few days and shoot some new promo content and do a bit of marketing. Or <<shudder>> go into free chat a bit... eek!!!!


Sabby:)

That IS some good advice BV. I do hear ya. I tend not to freak out and worry day-to-day like I used to, and I've experienced the ups-and-downs, believe me. It's when it feels like someone turned off the faucet suddenly on days when I've seen very good sales in the (recent) past I get frustrated. Being the weekend, working, and it being 110 in NYC ain't helpin'. :)

This was years ago so I don't remember the specific length of time but ratios went from great to unimaginable literally overnight and stayed sucking for months. I replaced all CCBill sponsors with something more lucrative.

Getting setup with the cascade is relatively simple, tho if you have miltiple pricing options it can get a little tricky. Plus there is a certain amount of cross-communication between the two billers, and sometimes they speak differant technological languages so often you, the site owner, is the translater. LOL But getting setup is doable.

What I meant is this: Say a CCBill affiliate sends his traffic to your site and gets a sale. Great! If the surfer signs up with CCBill he gets his 1/2 and if the surfer signs up with Epoch he gets his 1/2. All good, the affiliate gets paid (always a good thing).

But if you switched the cascade, and the surfer signed up with Epoch, his $29.95 ends up in Epoch's bank, so to speak. So where does the $15 that goes to the affiliate come from? From your CCBill account, not your Epoch account. In other words, Epoch doesn't physically put $15 back into your CCBill account, they just tell CCBill who should get credit for the sale. So then it's up to YOU, CCBill account holder, to pay that CCBill affiliate.

So it's entirely possible - I have had this happen a few times now - that you can make 20 sales, say, with Epoch, all of them affiliate sales, and then check your CCBill account to find a negative daily balance. WTF? The affiliate has to get paid remember, so the funds were taken out of your weekly payout amount. If you had enough in non-affiliate CCBill sales, or rebills, or both, then maybe you would see a small profit.

So what I heard was that CCBill was looking into differant ways to get CCBill affiliates paid other than the above scenario.


Hush you. The grown-ups are talking.

What do you all think of Zombaio?


Sabby:)

[QUOTE



Hush you. The grown-ups are talking.[/QUOTE]

FIX it Daddy before I stamp my feet and.... grrrr.... I dunno just fix it.. damn you all fix the internet right now!!!!!


Sabby:)

No affiliate support but I am using them right now. Rebills seem to be not as good as ccbill but sales seem to be more steady. Still tons of denials.

show your tits again please

lol...

like I said... I need to do some promo content and marketing...

Ive been a very busy cam girl though... I freak when my income goes under $50 avg per hr logged in and Im rarely in free chat.


Sabby:)

this week just sucked extra bad.

Im working on selling some new HD movies... I sold alot of PTV shitty quality ones on NF... I think HD will do better.


Sabby:)

Still tons of scammers trying to use stolen cc.


Sabby:)

Yep. Saw 3 frauds yesterday.

CCbill sales are not good on my end too! Almost cut in half with more traffic pushed than last month and I know I can not do anything about it because It is not fault with my traffic. Something is up there with ccbill and banks making ratios shit by adjusting the scrubs and denying cards way too much. Things are too worse in july with ccbill.

I believe ccbill adjusts the scrub every now and then. Because one day you have 10 sales and second day you've just nothing??? Even with more traffic, you can not get any sales and after a few days everything is back to normal again.

Imagine, If you've a shop in a very good area of your city and customers DO COME in your shop and won't buy anything. Sure, the things won't be same for everyday but It will not be like one day you get 10 customers from 100 visitors and next day you get 0 customers from 200 visitors. It can be like that rarely on special occasions but It is simply not possible.

There are lots of things ccbill need to take good care of like refund, chargebacks etcc... and I'm sure they adjust scrubs on particular accounts. Because If a particular paysite is having too much refunds and chargebacks, ccbill will not higher the scrub for everyone in this case so they will have a feature which allows them to scrub too hard on a particular account.

Things I've always noticed with ccbill

1. If your month start too good and things look great in statsremote, you can be sure that you are going to get fucked very hard in the coming days..

2. If you are using ccbill, forget about the word 'stable'. CCbill sales are never stable and I've never seen a month when CCbill sales were 'stable'. However, there are some non ccbill sponsors where I see this pattern way way less.

I started month with 1:1800 ratio one week and went to 1:11000 next week. It is plain ridiculous. I'm not blaming ccbill or anyone. Not arguing with anyone either because its my opinion. CCbill is very reliable and sends payments like clockwork but If they would have stable sales, It would be alot better for everyone.

Yeah the summer is here but cock erect all the time regardless to summer or winter so the sales should flow. Maybe a bit less in summer but not the ratios like ppl are having.

Every month my ccbill sales take a big swing, up or down. However with non ccbill sponsors, If I compare stats on monthly basis, the swing is way way less......

Just my opinion and I wisht ccbill sales come back again......

For our first 7 yrs never had a summer slow down it was steady and then it went up a notch in the fall and peaked in Jan. The past three yrs there has been a slow down. I have a friend had two yrs of steady growth and last month was the first month it didnt grow.lots of shit is happening out there, you read the papers it scares the shit out of people. Also cc companies are still cutting open credit. Alot of people wont use a debt card to buy porn and I dont blame them. Work hard , grow your reserves(the rainy day fund) and we shall over come. :)

On the one hand I am sorry to hear you going through all these ups and downs. But on the other it makes me feel less insane to be complaining, as I am not alone in all this.

If this is just "the way it is" then I don't know a good solution.



From your lips to God's ears, friend. :)

I think there is a little bit of confusion as to how cascades work with ccbill in this thread.

Anyway, CCBill is obviously putting as many transactions through as they can. I've talked with programs that do several million dollars worth of sales a year and sometimes CC Bill has better throughput, sometimes the others do. But for the most part it balances out.

The reason you don't notice it as much with your NATS sponsors as an affiliate is because they are all running different billers at different times in different places in their cascade, so over a bunch of NATS programs, you won't see the dips, but they are still there. This is what makes people run around talking about how NATS programs are still doing well while CC Bill isn't.

That's pretty much the answer.

Ratios seem to be better today but this is not surprising, but rather a type of confirmation of this thread.

Good thing I like rollercoasters. WHEEEEEE!

THIS is the answer to sales on the Interwebs today:

Great thread, BTW :thumbsup

So let me get this straight, CCBill of course a giant processor of this industry and handles a huge percentage of the transactions compared to other processors. Since they are so large their banks can sometimes not handle the problems side of this mass of transactions (fraud, chargebacks, etc..) and they are forced to shoo away sales whether legit or not for a short period so that everything can get caught up and situated? And this is why some of the lesser processors see better numbers.

Allegedly.

With all due respect what we have here is no different than a married couple where one has all indication that the other is cheating(gut feeling,abnormal erratic behavior, insists everything is fine, outside parties(hundreds other webmasters) observing same odd behavior,etc..

then you have the suspect mate who may be cheating having friends cosign and say all is well ( multiple gfy ghost accounts and ccbill schills try to divert focus and make you question yourself...oh its your mind playing tricks on you...why would ccbill do such a thing,etc....

bottom line... a multi-million dollar company moving millions of dollars a day, without independent oversight or audit from its massive collective of clients(salary payers...us webmasters)

we will only continue to add these suspect ccbill threads ad infinitem .

Trust that they have the resources, and where with all to confuse, divert, and placate the 1 in ten of us who smell a fat rat!

You guys are not insane, not paranoid, just out numbered by those in the biz who cannot think critically about this

it may not be today, or tomorrow but to think that we will never find out the truth is foolish. It will come out whether we are all paranoid or whether our concerns have merit.

just a question like you hear so often when your civil liberties are being eviscerated... ccbill if you have nothing to hide would you mind opening up the books for those that have questions....

Don't u love it when people say if you have nothing to hide... LOL of course, I don't really want to see your books...

if you don't like ccbill use someone else.

You're leaving a fortune on the table by running your business through a processor provided back end. You NEED to control your business, you NEED to own your data, you NEED to maximize your opportunities.

CCBill's system allowing the limited use of a couple other processors is a great move, but it's 10% of the picture. If you want to succeed in this industry you need the proper tools to allow you to do so. If you're not running on a 3rd party backend you're simply leaving money on the table and putting all of your eggs in one basket. Both of these are very bad ideas.

This industry is no where near ending. Most of those screaming that it is day in & day out are simply looking for something to blame their failures on. There are plenty of people succeeding in this industry. These days most of them just don't bother to visit this board.

Don't limit yourself, control your business.

You make absolutely excellent points here! This may be the direction I, personally, am going in. My company has grown and grown, and as it has I've taken over and exerted more 'control' over the billing process, as much as I can. Perhaps moving to a system like NATS while integrating it with a number of processers may be the solution here.

Thing is, for a growing business, and still a medium-sized one, each new "leap" brings risks and sometimes even emotional/psychological barriers that need busting through. So going from a single processer to a cascade to total control over the billing process mirrors, in a way, the growth of the individual business owner.

So as these progressions occur it's natural, I think, to try and make a current situation "work". of course, again, what you say has great merit because there comes a point where the sane individual says "enough" and finally makes that last leap to billing independence.

It's also a great way to learn nats, get it fully tweaked out, understand it, books/payments worked out... then release when you know it's pimp!

Changing to a standalone backend doesn't mean more sales though, for sure not simply because of additional processors or cascades, but it does mean a larger potential for being able to generate more sales because some limits are lifted that can be taken advantage of.

The extra potential, over time... normally years, is a program taking advantage of those lifted limits and breaking outside the 'normal' setup. Nice thing is, the advantage starts the moment you take the first step to do something you haven't done before. So it really comes down to, what you're going to do once you have nats.

Could the difference in ratios between ccbill and others be something as simple as the checkout pages? Doesn't ccbill identify the customers ip and give them the checkout page from the server closest to them?

If this is the case, and some of the servers are slow, the prospective customer may just give up.

I have no idea if any of this is accurate but we also have had dramatic ups and downs, and it seems that everyone with ccbill has these up and downs on the exact same days.

To be fair, we have briefly experimented with other processors and didn't find any improvement. Never tried Epoch though.

Cheers for the great advice, and this is something I'm considering. The thing is, for a medium-sized biz like mine, where I do 99% of the work involved, switching to a new billing system, even on the backend, is kind of like switching engines in the car while driving down the freeway. LOL Sure, it can be done, and in the way you suggested, but it all takes time. Frustrating.


I would definitely recommend giving Epoch a shot, as this thread has mentioned the comparison between the two companies a lot. I have not tried Zambaio or Verotel or other processers so i cannot say about their ratios.

As for load times: I've done some speed tests, and have hired a firm to do so for my company back in May, and we both found that CCBill form load times can be anywhere from 1.1 second to 4.5+ seconds. When the cascade is switched to Epoch as primary, however, since I'm using the CCBill cascade system (not the Epoch cascade system, which is differant) there's a little "hop, skip & jump" when the surfer clicks a Join option as it cascades over to Epoch. So the overall load time is about equivalent. I've brought this up with CCBill and they say it's not a load issue. So there ya go. LOL

If (and i do say if) CCBill was turning away all these transactions and not reporting any declines, as has been suggested over and over again,

Don't you think there would be a fair amount of customers emailing in complaining why they can't sign up to the site?

I mean if it's as bad as some of you suggest there would be hundreds of thousands of customers that can't sign up with CCBill.

Does anyone have any emails directly from these people CCBill is (allegedly) blocking out?

Of course no one does. I know I don't.

There should be thousands of complaints/emails every day if only 1% sent an email! (if this was true)

Running a standalone program, mostly by yourself is a serious task... it's not greatly different than what you're doing, but it is more to do either way, before learning it.

You could save yourself some time, staff time and you money and headaches by just hiring someone that knows nats/ccbill to come through and setup the entire thing up for you quickly, then show you how to manage it as well. Then again, nothing wrong with learning it all from the ground up.

I thought about this as well, and you are right no one is emailing in claiming they cant purchase a membership.

In four years with ccbill, we have probably had 5-10 people email about not being able to sign up and almost every one of them was foreign. This is out of thousands of transactions..

Well-l-l BV I think it's a wee more complicated than that.

1. If i get a "pre-auth" decline from CCBill that means (I believe) that CCBill itself rejected the potential member - based on fraud detection, scrub, whatever reason - and sends ME a decline. But that 'decline' did not cascade over to Epoch otherwise I would see the corresponding form hit on the Epoch side, right? But I don't under this scenario.

Now if the BANK rejects the surfer THEN it cascades over to Epoch (again, I believe). This means CCBill put the attempted transaction through to one of (or all of) their merchant banks and the bank rejected the sale. So then it goes to Epoch and Epoch gives the sale a shot with one of their merchant banks (which may or may not reject the sale).

So why doesn't CCBill cascade the "pre-auth" decline as well? If they don't want the sale and reject it out of hand because of whatever internal reason, why not let Epoch give it a shot?

2. Who is a potential (rejected) customer going to email? They're going to email CCBill first and go 'WTF?' Now you know many, many porn surfers are impulse buyers, so if they get rejected they go "FUCK!" and beat off to a tube in frustration.

Again, most people won't contact a site - ANY site - and go "WTF I can't join your site/buy from you". IMHO most people will assume it's THEM - their credit, their bank, their checking account. Then maybe they try again in a few days or a week or two and by then CCBill has taken its' foot off the brakes and everything goes through. "Ah see? It WAS me (my card, bank, etc)!" So no emails to the site.

PS: And I bet if a surfer checks his card after he's been denied, finds there's enough on it to join, calls CCBill and says this, CCBill will let that person through. What'cha wanna bet? :)

What about people that just back out and don't signup for whatever reason? If they aren't reporting a decline, it would tell me they aren't filling out the form.

It could be mass consumer behavior adjusting to layout standards for credit card forms.

I could be way off... but that's why I feel the real amateur, real amateur design, the underground/bondage connection, etc... did so well with them because the style of join forms they have fit the 'amateur/underground' look. :2 cents:

A clean, simple, easy to follow, least amount of text, least amount of scripts and b.s. as possible, white bg/black text, blue links on a cc form creates the most trust, it matches the standard used across the Internet now, and it's stupid easy to use for everyone.