New sites make you realize how badly we are gouged on credit card processing
 

For the first 6 months of a new paysite it really sucks - as if the 14.5% CCBILL and Epoch take isn't enough you have the 5% holdback being deducted with no return - it's depressing, site is doing decent sales but 20% off the top for credit card processing is ridiculous.

I don't think i ever checked out one of your sites. At least not on purpose. Hehe.

Not sure why you would focus on the 20%. It's a cost of doing business. Similar to price of content. It's a cost of business.

There are things you can do to reduce that cost, if you wish. Get your own merchant account, etc.

20% is a HUGE expense - you put that 20% credit card processing on mainstream brick and mortar businesses and every mall in America would be boarded up fast.

I can't go the merchant account route - solo site affiliates hate programs that aren't run on CCBILL's platform. i see the traffic those sites get compared to mine.

On top of that the cost of using a person to do the accounting could cost much more than the 20%. I wear toooo many hats as it is.

I would have to ad in dealing with.

Merchant Bank account.
Employee to Checks, wires, etc.
Auditing both.
Software to run the transactions.

Do what we do. Count the holdback as an expense in your budget (think : forced savings), then count the returning holdback as "found money" later on. The "extra cash" can be re invested in your business, or for new toys, or anything else you want. You could also mark-up your prices an extra 5% to cover your current loss too if you think your customers wouldn't mind but only you can know that for sure.

now, if you give 50 percents to affiliates, how are you making money? :)

Many programs give affiliates 50% after all fees. So on affiliate sales, 1/2 of those fees are being taken out of the affiliate payout. That fee structure also assumes no other revenue downstream. If you are running ads for upsells in the members area and they raise your revenue on a join by 10 or 20 dollars you aren't paying a processing fee on that additional revenue. Offering members quality upsell products and services that enhance their membership *without* annoying them, is a solid way to increase revenue per join and mitigate the overall fee structure of your third-party processing. :2 cents:

I think its about time for CCbill to lower their rates.

Times are changing and they need to change too.

Tell that to Venus at Landofvenus.com - now you could say that she has done so well because she is in a niche that hasn't much competition to speak of but I would posit that one of the reasons that site has done well over so many years is because it is not a CCbill program.

All those CCbill solo sites go out of business all the time so why people have a blind allegiance to something that might be prone to failing for the very reason you are complaining about just doesn't make sense at all.

Would be nice, but jet fuel is expensive.

Wish you'd get your own merchant account and use nats, ccbill affiliate program sucks ass

quoted for truth!!

maybe just mutt;s affiliates are obsessed with CCBill but i avoid it like the plague.

Venus was a pioneer - one of the first 10 solo interactive amateur sites on the Net and she is still benefiting from that. Sites back then didn't need affiliate traffic. Being non-CCBILL didnt help her get more traffic - it helped her keep more of the money her site took in and she could set her own scrub so made more sales.

Mutt, we use NATS. And Claudia Marie's site gets plenty of traffic. Don't get caught up in that billing processor belief.

Serious affiliates don't give a shit who you process with. They care if the site is good and makes sales and retains.

Quoted for truth.

Mutt you have three or four sites. Wrap them all up into one program with a proper billing structure, utilize all of the great billing tools that are available to you, AND pay less.

I don't even see this being a question.

Why would they do that? Not like there are that many other choices...

I thought you might say that too... :winkwink:

Sites still don't necessarily "need" affiliates. In fact, in most cases I would say that a focus on affiliates is the other site killer.

(pregnant pause, crickets, penetrating stare of "what the fuck are you trying to say now?")

Solo sites, and all new sites that put an emphasis on affiliates first are just giving themselves a steeper hill to climb. Affiliates take up more resources for less of a margin of return than focusing on internal traffic efforts first; organic SEO/organics and purchased traffic, managed well, these are going to provide a higher margin and more stability in the launch phase, imo. Affiliates should only be the focus after those areas have been addressed.

After all, a program that can stand on its own merits without having to rely on affiliates is more stable in the long run and therefore more profitable to affiliates too.

And these days...affiliates just don't have the "real" traffic that they used to (thanks to sites like Pornhub, etc)

I make a lot of money off of Claudia Marie working her Twitter and Facebook pages just using cellphone pics I take of her in everyday "normal" life and posting them on her blog and then posting the URL to the blog post on social media.

Then the blog post has a link to her site.

Not only does that produce sales...but it produces FANS who will stay loyal forever.

+1

.....

There you go Mutt.
That's pretty much the only affiliate on here with any real traffic left.

Mutt, assuming you aren't totally relying on affiliate traffic seeing as this is 2012, do this...

- Have a merchant account for your inhouse traffic
- Have a CCBill account for the affiliates you think want it

There are competitors out there who will give you a MUCH MUCH better deal. It's your choice where you want to go......




*hint hint!*





:)



.

Interesting

We went this route since I do get Mutt's point, even though I don't necessarily agree with it.

We put CCbill on some sites since there were a handful of sites, a well known review site comes to mind, that would only send traffic to a ccbill site, but I think that had more to do with them hating RevEX back then than anything else. (over five years ago) Did the move bring in more affiliates? No. It really only worked for that one affiliate and even it came over to NATS eventually.

Maybe solo sites do have a disproportionate amount of people that only do CCbill, but I put that up to laziness on the part of the affiliate that learned how to use CCbill back in the days of Tawnee and Raven and weren't comfortable using anything else, along with the patently false perception that CCbill couldn't be cheated as solo sites have a bad rep for burning webmasters.

I don't really see any big affiliates jumping in here to echo the "CCbill or bust" dialectic.

I've been disagreeing with you a lot lately but here I absolutely agree.

Serious affiliates are going to push a site if it sells. They're going to factor in that they aren't going to get paid by a few programs but they realize that all businesses suffer from loss and factor that into the equation.

If you rely on only CCBill sites you are leaving money on the table. If you lose the equivalent of 3 sales on top of 100 new sales because one of the NATS program that sells well goes bust, it is still nice to have those 97 extra sales.

Unless someone earlier in the thread has already pointed this out, what do you mean the 5% has "no return"...?
I've been getting my holdback back for years...sure it's a couple of months or whatever...but, suck it up, man....the point of that is in the event of chargebacks or whatnot.

Adult site sales are a "risk", sadly, so their 14.5% is better than not having ANY processing...and the holdback serves a purpose and you get it back...

Like someone above said, raise your damn price a buck or two, and you have that covered...:thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup
:2 cents:

I agree with people here who are saying if the girl is hot enough, people will promote it. Seriously I like ccbill and promote it a lot but I have no problem with other sites using nats, dhdrev, verotel, whatever. If the girl is hot, damn straight im gonna promote her.

this is one thing I never understood. If you grouped all your sites together on one ccbill you would most likely be making enough sales to get to the next level where you would only pay 13.5% or 12.5%.. This isn't 2005 anymore I know that but I recall a webmaster I knew that was only paying 10 or 9.5% cause of the amount of sales he was making.

:thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup - What he said.

:thumbsup:thumbsup

Put another way... CCbill charges about double what Mutt would pay to run it himself, even paying for similar servicing, like sending checks, etc.

So, he would need over double the sales for it to equal affiliate income from non-ccbill affiliates. Does anyone really think it would be worth the extra time and expense and justifying the additional work one would have to do to support those affiliates - to acquire those affiliates, then motivate them, and finally solicit those sales? I personally think the time would be better spent finding affiliates that don't have ccbill only restrictions and paying them a bit of the juice you make on what you save not using ccbill.

Raise your join prices to offset those fee's man

Well if you really think that's true, offer affiliates two options

One where they share the high ccbill fees with you like you have now
And one where they get a higher commission but run on NATS :-)

Wanna bet a lot of affiliates will be switching ;-)

Alt-F
"bitcoin"
no results

I am begining to think that ccbill scrub = if creditscore>800 then process else decline

catch22

Mutt, time to start a program with all your girls, use the nats promo to get started :)

https://gfy.com/showthread.php?t=1083668

I don't know about the whole in house thing. the number of sites that have done that and conversions gone to shit is unnerving.

There was a certain amateur program that I did ok sales with from 2006 to 2010 (when they swapped to in house) and now i've made zero on rebills and am at 1:6k on signups. I can't for the life of me figure out how to convert them now as it feels like they are going 'one for you 10 for us'.

ccbill sucks, with no traffic stats, your just throwing traffic at a ccbill program and hoping something sticks.

Your sites are professional and your girls are hot, I would promote your program regardless of what platform you used

The problem is many sponsors just can't resist putting their hands in that ole cookie jar. When times get tough it's tempting to use your affiliate's share as your bank. And times are certainly tough. I don't hold a switch to Nats against an ethical sponsor but if I notice my conversions skyrocket and rebills fall hard within a year of the switch then I'm bailing and assuming the worst.

That is probably the case. :2 cents:

Well they also worry about actually getting paid too. ;)

Please read the thread:
"Included in this screenshot is our CCBill Paid Program Integration. With this integration, affiliate program owners can now utilize the vast benefits of the NATS software including powerful features such as advanced detailed reporting, numerous pre-built and fully functional adtool types and much more while having CCbill issue their affiliate checks."

You can use nats with ccbill and let ccbill do the payouts as well.

Epoch does not charge any reserve. Zero. Zilche. Nada. And we haven't for years.

No hold back and no security deposit.

So send your primary traffic to Epoch and let those who do charge a reserve take your cascade.


.

Yeah dude, 1:6k. Don't even waste a minute more of your time on that.

So your plan to help Mutt save money is to have him spend money on NATS and retain ccbill :thumbsup

Great thinking - why didn't he think of that himself?

Stopped some time ago, this thread made me go back and look at what it use to be and what it is now.

I did as you mentioned in your first post, once rebills stopped showing from the previous method of processing, I stopped pushing the site.

CCbill should really be taking notes of threads like this and the amount of threads like this about them. The large majority seem very dissatisfied with them. I'd like to see the upgrade a lot of things, starting with their admin.

Well he said he didn't want to get rid of ccbill since some affiliates, maximum two of them didn't want to promote his sites unless he used ccbill... The rest of us wants to use nats so we get great stats and campaign tracking etc so it's a win-win. Not looking to help him save money :2 cents: