Which is better mpa3 or NATS I have to get one of them

Lets start with the different billing options or rather the different IPSPs we support:
CCBill, Paycom (normal and low-level), Jettis (hosted and gateway), IBill (yeah, I know), SegPay, 365 Billing, MyVirtualCard, Verotel, DHD Media, OPS Billing, VXS, Merchant Partners (both hosted and gateway), WTS, ElectraCash, 123Bill, ChargeMeLater, EuroBill, 2000Charge, txtNation, GXB, E-PayCompany, NoCreditCard, Password By Phone, Phone Access, EnterCharge, NETbilling, Authorize.net, LinkPoint, Plug'n'Pay, Symmetrex, UniversalProcessing, eProcessingNetwork, protx, idbill.

On top of that we are currently working on testing LocalBilling and a few other IPSPs I do not have a full list on right now.

ALL of them are of course cascadable, including between different types of solutions (IE CC to Check). Since we are talking about cascades, a small breakdown of the features in that department too here:
- Unlimited different Cascades
- Unlimited entries in each Cascade,
- Random Cascades (for example, to send half your Traffic to CCBill -> Paycom and the other half to Paycom -> CCBill)
- Activate Cascades per Site
- Geotargeted Cascades (allow and deny certain countries for a specific cascade)
- Geotargeted Cascade Entries (allow and deny certain countries to use a single entry in a cascade)
- Automatic Cascades (this allows you to tell NATS that if a certain cascade's geotargeting is acceptable, it will directly use that one cascade without even showing the join page. Point here is to for example redirect certain countries directly to a dialer solution to not have them bother with the join page)

This is it for now, more to come for the next part in a bit.

MPA3 hands down.

We have clients running each.
The happiest are the MPA3 ones.

Next thing.. Sites.

In terms of sites, NATS offers an advanced integration system. Basicaly you can treat NATS as the biller in your setup. NATS talks to the billers for you, but it has all normal biller-features, for example: postback urls for approval, denial, rebill, credit, chargeback, expire and upgrade (limited trials); user management where NATS does the user management requests to a script of yours running somewhere, for all important requests such as add, change, delete, expire, check and trialtofull conversions; join page configuration so you can tell NATS what options to display on the join page and to of course design the join page.
NATS also offers setting up unlimited tours per site, and offers tracking of those seperately (since NATS v3). You can also link programs and sites individually, so not all sites need to be in each program.
The site template system is great too, on top of the obvious join page template all other things are templated too, including: gateway join page, cascade page, result page (approval and denial), upgrade result pages, all emails. And all these templates are editable PER TOUR if you want to. If a certain template does not have a special design for a certain tour, the design for the site is used, if the site does not have a special design then the standard NATS design is used instead.
Of course NATS integrates directly into SPARTA, our password protection tool.
NATS also allows you to setup partners (unlimited) for each site that get a certain share of the profits or income.
Last thing to talk about relating to sites is the join pages themself I guess, but I'll do that seperately, too much to say

This is quite brave statement. Charges in VOIP industry are generally "per minute", not "per call". I belive this is some sort misunderstandind of VOIP biz from Nathan.
I really doubt that any adult program- NATS ,MPA or other can provide realtime stats on "per minute" bill basis WITHOUT any modifications, while both can do it with almost no changes at "per call" basis.

I guess the question is which program is more flexible and needs less changes and which company will be ready to drive an extra mile in terms of support and get the VOIP stuff integrated :-)

As I said my advise is - send more detail description of wht you need and see which company is more flexible and tehically more competent. If you use asterisk system, very low level can be made.

Peter, I realize that you do not know NATS. But how about you stop commenting on it then also, ok? I also know what VoIP is, we use it ourself, so stop pretending you know more than I do. We can do it on a per minute basis without any kind of change, same goes for a per call basis without any kind of change, heck, you can even do BOTH at once and pay affiliates seperately.. or heck, make 2 programs, one pay ing per call, one paying per minute.. and yes, all that WITHOUT any needed changes.

BTW, join page info coming up in a bit, I was out a bit...

Join Pages...

NATS has quite a few great features related to join pages. The most important one of course being that you are not forced to use a specific style or ask for specific information on the NATS-powered join page. The NATS-powered join page is the so-called pre-join page which is displayed before the cascade is started. NATS allows you to simply have links to the different payment options on that page, a full form asking for all user information and offering the different price-points, or anything inbetween those two. You can even 100% bypass the join page with special join page links, of course in that case hardcoding a specific cascade to use.

NATS will pre-fill any field it knows of already on the biller's join forms later in the cascade. So if you only ask for the email address on the pre-join form, only that field can be prefilled on the first biller's join form but of course later billers in the cascade will have more pre-filled data since the surfer entered the info on the first biller already and even if declined this information usually comes back to us.

NATS also allows for easy customization of the offered price points depending on the program and reseller that sent the surfer to the join form. This way you can easily offer different prices depending on per-sale or revshare programs, or give specific resellers special price options when they ask for them, or simply let the resellers choose what price points they want to send their traffic to.

And like I said in a previous post already, you can easily design the join page on a per-tour basis.

Give partnersoft 5 a look too
many big programmes use it

I can continue, this is just a small part of the features NATS has...

I've never used MPA3, but I've customized NATS to hell and back for over a dozen programs, and I can say it's a solid product.

i'm very happy with NATS for my program... been with them for about 18 months now... time flies!

This is always going to come down to preference- similar to the choice of car you choose to drive.

However, before you go either way, it never hurts to hear about the options.
I'm biased towards NATS, and I'll tell you why:

- It's got nothing to do with the 'gimmicks' of No shave ability etc (thing aspect that really hurt MPA2 in the last round

Both peices of software work well, so it comes down to distinguishing features.

1) INTEGRATION.
This is where NATS outstrips everything else - when you're buying into NATS, you're also buying into the abilities of CARMA and SPARTA - and that spells TOTAL site management, all from one panel. Nothing else that I know of has such a wide scope- most programs hobble together a biller admin, password systems and then a CMS. Tying all of this together really has to be one of the best innovations in the business.

2) AFFILIATE EXPERIENCE.
Both do a good job. Nats does a better job, I feel. NATS uses SMARTY templates - so you can craft your user's experiences to EXACTLY what you want - and even the default is sweet, the stats intuiative. I think people fail to realise the power that the SMARTY template system gives to their program. You can literally do ANYTHING you want. ANYTHING. Think about it some more - anything you can dream, it can be done. Nothing else comes close.

At the end of the day, I think it comes down to those two main points.

Summary- if you want to chat to me about these points - or help w/ CARMA / NATS integration (and it seems a bunch of people are needing it) hit me up, and I'll be happy to help you out. I'm busy, but i'm always happy to give you a helping hand.

If / when you make the move to NATS / CARMA - be sure to mention my name, Quantum-X / Simon, and can be sure you'll be looked after.

Simon

PLEASE.....

MPA3 or PartnerSoft.

Both are great programs from what we have seen and Partnersoft is good to but is not as feature rich.

Z

NATS rocks!!!!

Well, I belive I am free to comment any software I want :-)
I do not pretend I know more than you - I simply integrated more systems(affliate,processors,ERP,CRM..) in my life than you(At least i was writing affliate software when you were just end user of it - I think I have your ICQ number from these days :-))

However if you manage to integrate VOIP BILLING & NATS without ANY changes/mofications/settings on any of the 2 sites you should really patent that approach since you achived something that is truly unique

Interesting that you think you know what I did in my life, lol. The first affiliate software I wrote was in 2000. How about you? The number of different processors I have integrated into NATS is 35, maybe you did more, I have no idea. The number of apps I installed on client machines is probably not as high as you, thats right, but thats because I do not do installs...

If you feel I have something I can patent, I'll have to look into that I guess, its not rocket science though...

I've never used MPA3 or ran any 'real' amounts of traffic thru anyone using them, so can't say anything good or bad about them. I personally use NATS as my affiliate software and love it. I've also ran tons of traffic through other programs using it, and love it from an affiliates point of view.

After reviewing all the options and talking to a lot of people, we selected MPA3 for v.2 of our program, and we couldn?t be happier. We?re still in transition mode, but so far we love it and the support has been outstanding.

My Experience

Around September '04 we began looking for a turnkey affiliate program. We found MPA2/3 and determined that it was indeed the type of solution we were looking for. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending how you look at it), we were not able to come up with the funds nor were MPA and ourselves able to come to an agreement as it related to payment terms. So we dropped the idea focusing instead on improving our existing affiliate system on our own (bad idea when you?re not a serious programmer).

We were at the Jan '05 Internext when we came across the Zend booth (creators of PHP). We spoke with a gentleman there by the name of David Goodman. We explained to him that we were looking to get some custom PHP apps created to better our existing affiliate program. The conversation quickly turned to turnkey 3rd party affiliate applications. He immediately recommended Too Much Media and their NATS application. Stating that Nathan (Head Developer at TMM) was "the best" PHP developer he had ever met.

We found TMM to be very eager to work with us and our budget constraints. We came to an agreement and had our installation one month later. I personally am a feature/upgrade junky. This addiction was (and continues to be) very satisfied simply because the NATS application is actively being developed and refined on all fronts constantly.

We have been running two (of our own) merchant accounts for the last 6 years (only using 3rd Party billers/ISPS's when necessary), which are both interfaced with Paycom, Jettis & iBill (I know, I know). Too Much Media quickly revised there cascading feature to give us the ability to push our signups through a seamless/transparent "gateway/biller" cascade. This means we get three chances to convert the customers sign up attempt before they ever see a response from our system. We have found that on average over the last 12 months that 1 out of every 5 sales has been "saved" by the cascade. This feature alone justified the capitol outlay and efforts to get the new software in place.

As it relates to product support, I don't know where they find the time (honestly). Its mind blowing to me to think that they are developing, installing and supporting their products and still keeping everyone so happy. I have never once had a complaint about their operation. Even when I feel that I am really pushing the "support envelope" I never experience a lag in there response time.

Getting to the topic of members section security and authentication. We have been using a couple Apache modules by the name of Hack Detect and Hack Protect. The served there purpose for many years but, over the last 12 months we have seen an increasing number of compromised member accounts. Too Much Media's solution for this is SPARTA (also an Apache module). We have not seen a huge bandwidth spike since rolling it out! There really isn't that much to say about this product other than that it solved our problems in this area (see members(dot)strapon(dot)com for an example of our new login page).

StraponCash.com is a two man operation (one person for all affiliate support, "site partner" support, customer support and member/tour updates and one person to handle all the internal business operations). I reveal this because I think it clearly illustrates that one person (with NATS) can run the whole show! Not forgetting to mention that a solution of this caliber is not limited to big budgets and giant operations.

We are not "get under the hood" guys. NATS keeps us from screwing any of the backend up by making sure to provide us with access to everything we could possibly need in the admin interface.

I think on of the biggest things NATS has done for us is bring clarity as it relates to the fruits of our labors. We can now truly see what is working and what is not!

Our affiliate payouts have doubled in the last 4 months and we have had record breaking months (in terms of gross revenues) the last 3 months in a row! Now just to keep things in perspective our margins aren't what they used to be but we are defiantly back on track relative to the money we were "netting" 3 and 4 years ago.

I hope you found this post informative.

Courday
StraponCash.com / Adult Ventures, Inc.

the "Fore word" in the rears

I have come out of hiding for these two posts and have already returned to isolation now they are complete.

Now that you have read the post above please understand that I do not know which one is better because I have never had any experience with MPA3. I could only speak about my experience with NATS/TMM and hopefully you can come to your own conclusion based on all the information provided in this thread.

I know it's old news or whatever ... but ..

MPA will always have trust issues with affiliates.

NATS is must more trusted product, and we love working with them.