I use CCbill as well (and believe they are solid), but where there is smoke, there is usually a fire.

With all the threads popping up about them, I find it hard to believe everything is OK over there. I also don't believe if there were massive problems going on that they would alert everyone about it, as that possibly would cause a panic situation and many would drop them.

There are simply too many complaints about them right now for everything to be business as usual. Whatever the case, I do hope they fix it soon.

Funny how that works huh?

Another thing I've never understood is, the "Visa Rules" some of the 3rd party billers hide behind. They say you can't do this, you can't do that, can't say this, can't say that, all "Visa rules" they claim, not theirs. Yet, if you get your own merchant account you still have to get approved by Visa, yet you can get away with 95% of the things you were told were against Visa rules.

Interesting post :)
 

We have regularly users complaining (!!! :) that they can still login after expiration... They are afraid to be re-billed, so they complain, but this shows that the system is far from being perfect.

Very interesting thread so far :)

I promote CCbill sites that are more hardcore than my Verotel sites. eg www.latexangel.com www.extremehole.com www.laylaextreme.com all used to convert 1/500 for years but now they have all gone to the crapper. I have not had one sale to Extremehole.com for over 1 month NOT ONE!!!! and I used to get 15 sales per day for those three sites....

THERE IS SOMETHING DRASTICALLY WRONG WITH CCBILL!!!!!!!!!!!!:Oh crap

LOL contact me we're building and refreshing the affiliate program and I can provide some stuff custom if you need ;)

:D

The biggest issue in all of this is the lack of transparency for the end users of any of the billing companies. No one is ever going to tell you about the scrub algorithm, whether or not there is temporal scrubbing or even what the global probability of a rebill is across their system. You can never find out which banks they are using so you can research policy there. All of this stuff is deeply proprietary.

So the big downside to all of this is that you cannot plan your business effectively. You never know how a processor performs until you are sending them volume, and by then if it isn't what you had expected you are in deep trouble. I would like to see a little more leeway put into making expected numbers happen. For example if I have a rebill probability of .55 at processor x, I want to know why that isn't happening at processor y and how it can be fixed. It shouldn't just be a black box that traffic goes into.

Anyway, that's my issue. It's not necessarily a CCBill issue but I think it is a large part of what people are complaining about here.

HMMM I'm tending to agree with you. After seeing this I called Ccbill and am talking with Charles H. After digging he found a sharp decrease in affiliate payout that started in November. Mind you nothing has changed with my program as far as current affiliates are concerned. I did take my affiliate program private and am only allowing in invited affiliates at this point, and my program was switched over to wms, and then this week back to the old system again.

What I need from you is some specific urls my content as your using it so I can give those to Charles and have them investigate what this issue is.

Minds are wondering.

spooky i have been promoting latexangel and laylaextreme as well
and noticed the same thing

i believe the problem might be tracking? maybe the sales are still being made but just not getting the proper credit for them?

btw can you email me 200x300 banner or a 250x250 for your site featuring fisting and big toys ? to webmaster at meltingimages dot com

I will send you more traffic to compare instead of these other ccb sites

Of course I didn't miss it, but I figured the solution was obvious: just ASK them.

And please, no BS about not responding here. No processor in its right mind is going to reveal in public their security policies. Your account is between you and them.

Your account may have been under review because of some patterns their system picked up. Who knows. Since they are working for you, you have the right to ask them questions so you know where your money is going. They may not be willing to reveal the exact metrics they use, but I've never found them to not tell be upfront about an issue.

It could turn out your scrub was set high because of a glitch. Theirs is an almost completely automated system, and like I said in my first post in the thread, it's imperfect and has bugs. While they process for you, each of us has a responsibility to monitor our accounts.

No self-respecting business just "goes along" with what a vendor or bank says.

I think it matters what form activity you're getting, not just that you aren't getting sales.

First to do - if you haven't already - is get subscription confirmation and denial e-mails sent to you. The denial e-mails will indicate why a transaction was not approved. If you have a question regarding what a denial explanation means, ask them. There's really only about 5-6 that regularly come up anyway.

Log into your admin and send yourself a test signup. Their help explains how to do it. This checks that your form is correctly set up - and in fact that that subaccount is still active.

It seems to me that if you don't get even denial emails but people are hitting your forms then they're just not deciding to buy, or there is something wrong with your subaccount. Even if CCBill scrubs a customer out you'll get an email about it.

I'm no CCBill expert, but if I had no sales for even one day I'd be on the phone with them asking why. I'd ask them to do a system check, independently verify my forms, and look at my banking rules. I'm not in this for the fun of it, and I expect them to earn their 15%. (And so far I've never had them decline to help me, so I'm fine for now.)

Hi, I have sent off a few banners for you...:)

thanks got them
will send some traffic soon

btw you can try our sites too, we use nats and only ccb as a backup

also you might want to fix the link in your sig
http://www.cheatingxxxwife.com/extremecash.htm
is an invalid url

OK I am going to say this and probably get banned but oh well it needs to be said.

We all know that CCBills new WMS is fucked, hell they came here and admitted it was a mess basically.

Has anyone at CCBill ever thought that maybe that maybe their scrub was just as screwed?

It is so up and down, one day sales are good the next they fall off completely, CCBill sales are like a freakin' rollercoaster. So much of a roller coaster that I stopped pushing sites that have CCBill as their only processor almost 6 months ago.

I have been in this business twelve very long years and I have NEVER seen such a roller coaster in sales as I do with CCBill. Predicably my traffic produces x number of sales a day give or take 1 or 2 with every other processor out there, with CCBill it is a freakin crap shoot.

So CCBill how many of these threads are you guys going to blow off and just look at individual accounts before you take a look at the BIG PICTURE, your overall scrub and see what where the error lies? Or are you going to just ignore it and scrub yourself out of business?

You ain't gonna get banned for that. Needs to be said :2 cents:

This is now day 3 with almost extinct sales on my end. Very, very unusual. It is not just this dry spell as you mentioned, but more of a crap shoot is likely the best analogy.

I have an email in to markg and am awaiting answers. I suggest everyone do the same... obviously tomorrow or the next day after I get my answers

No probably not(because I did some editing a long the way, it wasn't very nice the first time I typed it out) but I am not normally one to shout, so to speak, but jesus this is getting ridiculous, every day the same shit and CCBills same lame freakin response, it is getting old and normally I am one to give a lot of chances but how many fucking chances does CCBill need, how many times do webmasters and owners have to say, "THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH CCBILLS SCRUB" before someone at CCBill actually listens.

There is such a thing as a business being to big for the brains behind it and my personal opinion is CCBIll is there. There is also a lot of credence in "Where there is smoke there is fire", accept I am not seeing smoke anymore I am seeing flames shooting out the freaking windows!

GOLDFISH YOU ROCK!!!! Very well said, you are not alone in heavily editing your posts either...

Golfish, we keep a close eye on our entire account. That?s akin to a webmaster watching sales stats. All I can respond with is this, we do everything we can to try to maximize throughput while mitigating risk. Over the years we have only gone down in our decline rates.

Its as frustrating to me as it is to you to see these threads. Ive been at CCBill 11 years and for most of it was the point man (as well as in charge of the risk department) for these sort of issues. We do everything we can to determine ways we can increase throughput/client revenue or find problems that we can fix to make things better, and when we see complaints like this, we run tons of reports to break things down and try to find something.

That said, you see patterns emerge, such as early jan breaking records, fluctuations around spring break (now), tax time, mid-may, etc...

And again, my offer stands to do tests with my personal card on a link or signup page to test from a real-world perspective...and if anyone would like to send us information to look at, please send to [email protected]

If you're a paysite owner you have the opportunity to look at the decline reasons. I am a paysite owner, and my sales are down the past three days, too (precisely three days; four days ago I had a pretty good day).

Of the couple of declines I've had in this dry spell/roller coaster/whatever, none have indicated they were declined because of scrub. The reasons were because of bank declines, such as Insufficient Funds. You see that a lot these days.

If, like Sara, you see a lot of scrubs the natural thing to do is ask them why. They have the ability to make individual changes to global settings. My account has a longer posting time than most, for example, because I asked for it. It allows me to have a bit longer time to identify fraudulent transactions and void them, rather than having to refund them. (Voids always are better than refunds.)

If you're an affiliate of a program that uses CCBill you can't see the decline reasons, but you can always send off an email to the site and ask if they've noticed a change. Hopefully they can inquire on your behalf.

I may be wrong but my assumption has been that RonC would like for his company to continue to make money. Would be hard if they were simply ignoring a problem such as unnecessarily high fraud scrubbing. I'm pretty sure Ron wants to make as much money as he can, but I could be mistaken about that.

Corvette, you can't have this many ppl saying something is wrong and pull the old tech support routiune saying it is not our fault, hit us up and we will look into it, there are to many ppl saying something is wrong!

CCbills system was built many many years ago, yes, it is an ever changing structure, but that brings a few questions to mind.

Was it ever meant to accommodate the volume of processing it does, the number of affiliate transaction it handles daily, the number of sites it manages? No. No one could have ever imagined that CCBill would become as big as it has.

Which brings us too what happens when you change something to accommodate an ever growing "population" that the system was never developed for in the first place? Well, it is just like an old computer, there are bits and pieces left behind that muck up the system, slow it down, make things go wrong and in the end make the system unusable. In my opinion that is where CCBill is at. The best programmers in the world can't keep that from happening, just ask Microsoft. Why do you think they keep coming up with new OS's?

Your going to site scalable here, but I'm sorry nothing is scalable to this size, the size that CCbill has become.

Now I understand that was probably the purpose (partially anyways) of CCBills new WMS but it failed miserably. A system can only be reworked so many times before it is time to scrap it and start from square one. It just isn't possible to make a system that was never designed for the amount of owners, affiliates and consumers that CCBill has scalable and not have issues. Issues are going to show up and in my opinion they are starting to now.

But honestly how many times can you say "we keep a close eye on our entire account" or "I'll do test with my own personal card" before you or someone at CCBill realizes that you are spending all your time tracking down the same issue?

the truth of the matter is that end is near...of all porn pay sites and that of ccbill. once they are gone there will be hardly any processors left standing
make hay while the sun sets...

OK VGeorgie, I will rephrase then.

There is something wrong at CCBill, whether it is the scrub or a system that was never meant to handle the sheer volume of consumer, affiliates and sites, or whatever, but with this many ppl saying something is screwed there has to be something going on.

I forward all emails directly to my phone now. I just started that and it has caused me to have rapid heart beats, high blood pressure, and very moody.

What would you classify this as?...

You are receiving this email to let you know that xxx xxxxx attempted to
subscribe to account 935699-0000 and was declined due to We are unable to process
your transaction at this time. Please try again at a later time..

Customer Name: xxx xxxxx
E-mail address: [email protected]

************************************************** ********
Billing services provided by CCBILL,LLC [email protected]

************************************************** ********

Something is wrong!!!

id be interested to know if anyone tried to do a test signup that didnt go through

The past 3 days have been totally fucked for me but it's not just CCBill.

I have couple oif cards that have never been used for signups, give me a couple urls, not from the same account. IE two different ppl two different accounts.

mmcfadden ICQ me the url to the site that gyou got that email for I will try it.

That is if CCBill won't have a hissy fit....

I have done over a dozen test signups over the past year with CCbill sites, and have been rejected on the majority of them.. I get a message saying "I have tried joining too many times" even though I havent tried to join a site for weeks, I also get the message that "my card has been declined and to try back later". :mad:

When I do a test signup on my Verotel sites I never get rejected!!!:)

Corvette, TURN DOWN THE SCRUBOMETER!!!!!!!!!:helpme

AGREED.

We have been with CCBill for 6-7 years now. Sales are good and support is perfect. Even better, our end users trust CCBill so repeat sales are a snap. Any newbies bitching at CCBill would do justice to their own business to look for other reasons why sales may be slower than expected.

Did it ever cross your mind that the scrub on older sites with more history may not be as tough. Don't know if that is actually the case but it makes sense when you think about it.

Another thing are all these ppl that are complaining sending traffic through NATs or whatever or are they using the CCBill links and non refferer links. If it is the latter then the answer is obvious, if that isn't the case then you are back at square one.

True, its been shit all across the board for me the last few days.

post uniques for the last 3 days, then form submissions, then approvals or in all due respect

STFU

First off, I'd classify it as a pain in the ass. I hate it when that happens. You can only hope the surfer will indeed come back and try again. (In my experience they often do, and usually it's okay.)

Second, I also have a mainstream business where I take credit cards. I have a telephone terminal for manually processing the cards. I'd say 1 in 5 or so times the call doesn't go through. The computer just doesn't pick up. About 1 in 10 I'll get other responses, like "unable to reach host" or "Service busy," or a bunch of other things.

(Note that my merchant account is not processed through CCBill. I use an outfit called Elavon, used to be Nova.)

When a processor authorizes a credit card there are a lot of organizations involved, including the cardholder's bank. If any one of these outfitrs is temporarily unavailable then the charge won't go through. I have the benefit of trying again in 10-15 minutes, but CCBill does not.

Either that or it's the effects of Nibiru, which is coming in 2012. So you really only have to keep your Web site going until then. Prepare a sacrifice to Marduk. It might help.

Maybe you're right, but I don't think CCBill is billing for many more sites than they were at the end of 2007 or early 2008. Probably fewer because a bunch of sites have disappeared.

No one complained about CCBill then because people were still buying things. I regularly had $800-900 days, and once a week had $1500 days. Not bad for a one-person site and only internal organic traffic.

Maybe CCBill has turned up a scrub setting, though I'm not getting that in the denial emails I review. I DO believe they are processing the same or even fewer sites than two years ago. That leaves two things:

1. Consumers aren't spending because they don't have the money. That's MY situation, so why wouldn't it be for other people too? I'm eating in tonight because I can't afford McDonald's.

2. The banks are tightening up. This worry keeps me awake at night. Wife and I tried to get a few thousand additional credit line so we could redo a bathroom. Got turned down, despite never being late on a payment, and having the card for some 20 years. Bank rep apologized, and said it was the result of the current economy. Banks are being more careful.

BUT... I do agree we shouldn't blindly assume everything is okay at CCBill. My first post on this talked about manually reviewing data and inspecting our accounts. That only makes sense, and I think we should all be mindful of watching over out respective castles.

Have a mainstream business myself and can tell you I process hundreds of transactions a week with Sterling and have NEVER had that happen, not once, in three years, the first two of which I was with another company. So you either need a new Merchant processor or I call bullshit!

Nope, no BS. Since it's easy to just resend the data it's never really bothered me. You might just be a lucky one. It happens occasionally when I buy something at a store I figured it's fairly normal.

Since you have a merchant account, and you appear to be doing volume, why not ask that they carry your high risk business? I don't do enough volume to justify it, but you could be saving yourself a ton of money, and cut out CCBill altogether.

I already have cut CCBill out, Zombaio does pretty well for me, but on the affiliate side there are a ton of CCBill sites out there that would be worth me pushing and I would love to be sending traffic too if it wasn't for the CCBill roller coaster ride.

As for having my own high risk account, Sterling won't do high risk, I have asked. But on the same token, when have your own high risk internet merchant account there is a ton of stuff you have to do that doesn't ever come up with a mainstream brick and mortar account. To much hassle.

But seriously, I would look at a new merchant processor if you are having these kind of issues, I have never heard of that many problems with getting transactions thru.

So you have an earnings history of thousands per week, but cant get an extra few thousand from the bank? seems odd...:Oh crap

Sounds more like todays bad economy.

Flurry of activity for anyone else today, after a catastrophic week?

Nothing here, zero...:Oh crap

yep... lots of rebills today! wierd.