I know nothing about either programs...

But I would think, actually I know, that instead of basing my choice on a poll of opinions, I would demo each program and choose the one that I liked the best and worked the best with what I was trying to accomplish...

Ok so which program should I "trust"? :-)
Sooo many comments.

I want to hear some more real life use about it all...

MPA3 has NO SHAVING right? OR am I wrong?
I would not like SHAVING related to the product I choose...

Oystin, comments please?

There's no built in shaving in either AFAIK.

MPA3, of course. It's great software and Oystein rocks! They've always been good to us and helped us in anyway necessary.

A big part of the problem with choosing anything in this biz is perception vs. reality. Someone makes a post complaining about something and it becomes the truth of the issue to people for a long time to come. Heck I still have people hitting me up thinking I still work for companies I consulted for like two years ago.

In any case, I haven't used MPA so I can't intelligently comment on it but I am very hapy with NATs. I'm sure they are both great products so you probably have to weigh out if either or the other is going to help the webmaster perception of your program moving forward.

Chris,

There is not even a remotely chance of ever having any shaving whatsoever in MPA3. Being in the position we are in, on the top of the list of affiliate program softwares, and always under scrutiny by both program owners and affiliates it would be suicide to even consider it. We take pride in protecting ourselves and our program owners and their affiliates.

Here is an example of what we recently did to a company that actually tried to add one to their MPA3 program recently:

http://www.xbiz.com/pressrelease_piece.php?id=10993

Copy of the release:

"
Mansion Productions Pursues MPA3 Misconduct
Thursday, October 27, 2005

LOS ANGELES ? Mansion Productions, whose suite of software products streamlines paysite administration, has issued a notice of termination to a user of its popular MPA3 affiliate software.

The user was found to have altered MPA3's source code. According to a top Mansion Productions officer, "We discovered that a certain affiliate program had deployed an unauthorized module that seriously tampered with Mansion's own code."

These changes could have potentially affected the integrity of affiliate data. The officer added, "We wanted to nip this in the bud to prevent any further abuse of our product to potentially create inaccurate affiliate data."

Mansion Productions has zero tolerance for this type of activity, and has engaged counsel to take appropriate action.

For more information, visit www.mansionproductions.com.
"

So as you can see we are very much on top of this.

We focus on ensuring that programs using MPA3 can seriously optimize the join sequense by offering all the most valuable payment platforms our industry has to offer. We also have features in MPA3 that allow for 100% zero traffic loss for the affiliates (if a surfer drops out of tours etc. they can be redirected to other programs they are promoting also outside of the "follow-me" type of feature that is already a standard feature in MPA3), extremely accurate tracking for the affiliates by not only using cookies, but also by using IP tracking where cookies fail.

Ill hit you up on AIM and give you the full access to the demo version so you can check it out for yourself as well.

:2 cents:

Not again...you didnt post the name of the affiliate program, so its obviously a fake story to make MPA look better.

Unfortunately it is very true. And we sit on the evidence and our lawyers handled the client for now. We shut down their $17,500 software and they hardly commented on it - something we find very interesting.

Tell you what, you sign a non-confid. agreement with Mansion and I will tell you who it is and show you the evidence. I have no problems with that. What is your ICQ? Ill contact you.

:2 cents:

sure, I have no problem with that, you can let me know at support (at) nextdoorcash.com
:)

You got mail :thumbsup

replied :thumbsup

Never used MP3A, but I love working with NATS.

Shane's World did a lot of research when it came time to choose NATS or MPA. After much back and forth and playing with both and soliciting opinions of others ... We went with MPA. I absolutly love the software and cant speak high enough about the support. It has opened lots of new doors for us as a program, made stats a hell of a lot better for our affiliates and a million other things i could run through here.

The thing that really has stood out to me is the support and the ability to customize it so easily. I truly feel the software grows with us. As far as support, i have never had a company go so far above and beyond the call of duty. For example, i had a problem with my old host on a holiday evening and was out of the office. My host did NOT contact me ... Mansion contacted me. They noticed the problem, tracked down my cell phone number and worked with the host all evening to get everything back up within 2 hours. They also helped track down tons of informtaion for me when i had a merchant company incorrectly overcharge me. MPA programers created a script to extract some much needed info to prove the merchant company was wrong ... all at no cost to me. They had no profit gaining reasons to do this.

I cannot comment on NATS support as i have not used it ... but i can say Mansions support has been amazing! If you need support and the ability to grow on the"fly" ... I say go with MPA. You will not regret it.

xoxo,
Megan

Well said Megan! Amazing support and customization.

MPA3 rocks. Very happy with it and I would recommend them to anyone.
Good luck with whatever you decide.

Thanks a BUNCH Megan. That means a lot coming from you and the Shanes World crew!

What I can say back is that we TRY, and we try hard.

:thumbsup :thumbsup

Ok, next question.....

Can we get feature lists posted here? I would like to know the features
of each. Now, yes, I can go *look* on the sites and etc... But I would like
to know which programs lack certain things people need/require and etc...
I dont need a feature by feature breakdown, but more like a list of the
things people actually use on a day to day basis.

Next question,
Will NATS or MPA3 work as an affiliate system for a VoIP service provider?
Its much like the same thing as membership sites... The only real difference
is they get phone numbers as usernames and phone-type things like that.

What is the most non-adult installation of nats and mpa3 out there?
There has to be some mainstream non-adult use.

-Chris

Chris,

For the feature list it will be a lot more helpful to give you the full demo over the phone and guided via your browser as we go. Our clients obviously use a lot of the same features on a daily basis, but also there are so many other features that some use and some dont. In fact, I dare say that MPA3 is so full of features that if we take the client that use the MOST of all the features we offer in there - they still only use 80% of what CAN be used. (!!!!!)

MPA3 can be used as an affiliate system for systems such as a VoIp service provider - some minor customizations and it should be in place. We have other clients that does similar things using MPA3 in mainstream.

To your questions about mainstream clients I can honestly say that we dont have a LOT but a few companies using it very successfully - it translates well.

:thumbsup

well,
at least MPA3 should be able to do it. if you bill your customer on monthly plans it should really make no differnce between memberships and VOIP monthly billing.
It will be small changes.
if you wanna more bigger integration with platforms like Asterisk or Cisco VOIP(have bill per minute plans) is a little bit more complicated but yet doable.
I think may be it is best to speak with oysteinATmansionproductions.com.
I suggest you prepare some brief description on how your system work and send it to him.

Regarding NATS it is possible too. However I belive it will be more stable and scalable if you go with MPA3 guys.

Hi Chris,

I'll post a list of features here in a bit, it will take me a while to collect them all though, but I'll do my best to give you the main ones.

Handling a VoIP service provider is no issue at all, and also needs no customization due to the advanced features NATS offers. You could even let NATS payout based on the number of calls made, give them call stats and such without any customization through our extended payouts&stats system.

Since we are of course routed in adult most of our customers, just like MPA, are adult companies. We do have a few shops and a few software companies selling applications via NATS. Of course also multiple pharamacy sites.

Again, regarding the features, I'll be posting some here ASAP.

Chris , we are very happy with NATS :) go for the gold cheers

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.....

http://www.joemaria.com/jnat.jpg

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.
:thumbsup

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.