NATS vs MPA3 - which one and why
 

For those of you who run Affiliate Programs and use either of the above programs, please explain which one you'd use and why.

Wanted to get some opinions regarding both

pros and cons

Here it comes again....there have been dozens of threads about this over the past weeks man. Do some research

I am personally going with nats as I think it's a more well rounded piece of software but RUI is right use the search and then come ask some questions if you are not sure.

someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed

It aint about what side of the bed you woke up, Its about either staying up with the
board or lookin like an ass by starting something that was already spoke about 10 X.

Nats - No shaving possible.

Did you talk to anyone at our company about this yet? If not, make sure to talk to John or myself today to really understand why NATS is so powerful.

I can only be reached on AIM right now (fthylmann).

Anyone with 5 minutes and a brain could whip up some PHP to wrap around NATS transparently to shave you.

Face it. Using NATS doesn't mean you can't be shaved. It might make it slightly harder - but far from impossible.

Just makes me chuckle when people are recommending using NATS because it doesn't have a shave feature.

Funny how everyone claims this. LOL. But noone actually told us how yet.

You go build a shave feature around NATS that is transparent and not easy to notice by anyone. Then we'll go and sue you and maybe then people like you will finally realize that we are serious about this.

And btw, its always better to use a program that has no shave feature built in than one that has one internally or can be changed via source to get one.

Anyway, NATS is much more than just a cascading billing solution without a shave feature. Anyone using NATS knows this very well, and anyone that has seen it in action know so also.

Rounders - email me for references and login to our live demo.

Here is a statement from one of our clients:

"Scott Trimble
VP of Marketing, Mensniche.com

In this industry, keeping track of your stats is immeasurably important and let's face it, finding adequate tracking software is difficult. In our experience, one size does not fit all - every company is different and each has their own idiosyncrasies and individual needs. Consequently, one of our biggest worries when choosing tracking software was the support that was provided with it. Without a doubt, we are convinced we couldn't have been as successful without Mansion Productions backing us. With bomb-proof support, they have exceeded expectations on every new project and proactively jumped on top of issues before they became problems. I recommend Mansion Productions to any company looking for tracking software that ensures its service does not stop at the sale."

Look out for more news in the press over the next couple weeks too.

:thumbsup

If I had to get a third party stats package I would go with Executive Stats.

Be it NATS or MPA3, shaving is going to be possible if the program owners are crooks.

I would ask to test drive both programs or demo them and find which one I felt more comfortable with. :2 cents:

Nats!!

(but if they dont shave, how long are thier beards?)

I love the strong stance against manipulating software to cheat webmaster. That is why I will always choose a NATS affiliate over any other.

Nathan hey. I love how you renamed the acronym for NATS.

I'll bet $1000 (seriously) that I could get the source for NATS, for one.

Secondly, track.php. How about, we rename that to track2.php, we create a new track.php, that does exactly what the original does, but without the database logging. And then, say, 80% of the time, it'll call the track2.php and do things normally. Wow! 20% shaving! Done!

Need a more detailed explanation?

Not a bad bet however that $1000 wouldn't even cover your first week's worth of legal fees.

I'll let Fabian answer the rest of your post.

Since when was it illegal to obtain the source of a program? Maybe in the US you can sue the hell out of anyone for any reason under the sun. But where I live, you actually need to have some sort of GROUNDS.

Don't make me laugh.

And don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying NATS may not be a very decent affiliate system. Moreover, I agree that it is better to use an affiliate system that doesn't making shaving easy.

But, people blindly thinking they will never be shaved by NATS are being naive. It is most definitely possible, but difficult.

I just find it amusing when people come on the board and start raving about NATS merely due to the fact shaving is not possible.

We have never taken a stance that it is impossible. You are right to say that people are wrong in having blind faith. What we do which is VERY unlike many in this business is take a VERY strong stance against it rather than turn a blind eye to it or make it was easy as possible. Like I said, I'll let Fabian answer the tech stuff. My days of being a "tech guy" are long gone now so I'll let him handle it when he wakes up in the morning.

As far as the legal thing. I'm pretty sure "hacking" which decompiling source code is considered is illegal in most countries with indoor plumbing.

Decompiling source code is not considered hacking. Our legislation defines hacking as "obtaining unautohrized access to a computer system via a telecommunications device." We don't have the DMCA; we don't have crazy copyright laws. So thank you for your insight, but you're wrong.

Moreover, who said I was going to decompile?

Regardless, it should be commended that you take such a strong stance against shaving/bonusing. However, your clients may not share that stance and I'd say there'd be very little you could do to prevent that.

My argument is purely shaving is possible in any program. People who think otherwise are being naive. If NATS makes this as difficult as possible, that's fantastic. But it is far from impossible.

Again, I'm not going to argue the technical stuff. Not my department. Fabian enjoys it far much more than I do :)

What country are you from?

Also, I'm curious to know how you would obtain the source other than decompiling it considering no one but us and our attorneys have a copy.

Australia.

Oh, and magician's never reveal their tricks! What fun would the bet be if I told you how it was done? :P

That was highly expected :)

Either way the fact that you would consider it in the first place shows your character :)

It is merely proof that modifying the source code would be another option in which to implement shaving.

Personally, I think the source code of every program should be publicly available to the clients. I find it devious to encode the script to prevent people from auditing it or the likes. So I think it shows more about YOUR character, than it does mine.

Everyone has their opinions :)

Here is my :2 cents:

I had MPA2 and I had tons of problems.

I now use NATS, we have no problems!


The choice is yours/

Try again. :1orglaugh

Did you offer him a Free Month of MPA3 use for this letter ?

You guys offered me something similiar a year or so back.

There is a new kid on the block. see sig

http://www.bradshawlive.com/esscreencap.jpg

BTW, we offer source code. But you have to pay for it................. For $150 a month, I would not expect anyone to turn over any source code.

That screenshot has been playing on reruns forever now. Got anything new? :)

Whats that supposed to mean? You talking about the one you find in the copyright header in files like config.php?

For which client of ours do you work?

You said (in later posts) that you would do it without decompiling. That would mean you would need to get it from wherever the source sits, which is our servers. So how would you get it WITHOUT illegally gaining access to our servers? You said yourself that this would be illegal in australia also.

Ok, great. So now if I am a webmaster, I check my links and suddenly see "hey, WTF, where is my affiliate code gone to??". You saying thats transparent? Strange definition of transparent to me. We would catch you in a heartbeat.

Typical reply by someone that actually can not do what they claim...

Seriously curious which client of ours you work for though.

We encode the script to prevent people from auditing it?? WTF. What gave you that idea? We encode the script to prevent people stealing from us and to prevent people editing the code.

James, out of pure curiosity, could you tell me what you prefer about Executive Stats compared to the others mentioned here?

I'm against NATS untill they help cheaters and multiposters to hide faces from editors on all traffic resources. The main problem is encoded affiliate codes.

I already posted my detailed opinion in this thread:
Couple words against NATS affiliate software

i would go with executivestats you get the source, and they got payment plans

Shaving is possible on ANY software.

i prefer my affiliates to use MPA3. my NATS stats have been shit since the switch

Again, and again, and again.. MSG ME!

You keep accusing NATS of making your stats worse, but you do not msg me so I can take a look into the problem.

Makes me wonder if you are making this up...

Makes the encoding a LOT worse than it is. Especially because its so friggin dead easy to decode it.

The reason we encoded it is that we did not want non-alphanumeric chars in the urls because those chars often makes urls less SE and script friendly.

In your post on AWI we did agree about not offering a non-encoded version was a mistake and we are changing that very soon. Then affiliates will have the choice to use either the encoded or decoded version, totally up to them.

We can not make these multi-variable urls (ie w=123&c=123&p=1&s=1) because of backward compatibility.

They will look something either like this: nats=123:123:1:1 or nats=c123:w123:p1:s1

richmedia, could you please contact me on AIM? I see no reason why we should not work together to make this a better system for everyone out there. If you have a problem with it, talk to us directly. We have nothing against suggestions for changes in our software.

Have fun reading this threads:

http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showth...highlight=NATS

This is a very (if you ignore the flames) good one:

http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showth...highlight=NATS

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Lots of bullshit but still with good info :)

http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showth...highlight=NATS

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Most MPA3 stuff but with some thread hijacking as usuall:

http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showth...highlight=NATS

---

Have fun :winkwink:

Another ICOO sig whore working for his quarter.

If you want info on NATS do a full search on it or talk to our clients. Especially those who used to be on MPA. Strangely enough there aren't any MPA clients who used to be on NATS :)

For you, no;-)

For someone with $25k, sure!

Your confidence in your software shows :)

How about for once in a discussion the shaving issue is put a side, neither mpa3 or nats offer a built in version and YES i am sure for both pieces you could do something to allow a shaving feature, but both have the stance that accounts will be closed...

So continue again, what sets the 2 softwares apart.

I'd love to be able to have that discussion without anyone dragging it back the other way :)

We are more configurable - You can setup as many programs any way you would like to. You can configure nearly everything on a per affiliate basis. etc. etc.

We are more scalable and stable - We've moved MPA2 clients with high load who had stats taking 1.5 hours to load that do in 1.5 minutes now. From what I hear MPA3 is better but still not as efficent as we are IMO.

We offer things like exit management which is VERY useful

We do everything we can to get affiliates to our clients. We have launched a Beta of Account Admin which is really going to help NATS programs grow and we are releasing our client list on our site Monday. Most of our competition won't say a word about who uses them.

Our Demo is 100% wide open. You can go in and take a look around and use the REAL software not some screenshots of it or imitations of it. And it's open to EVERYONE. We have nothing to hide and no fear of our competition seeing what our software does, etc. We are VERY confident in our product.

Our support is top notch. One of the biggest complaints about competing products when people move to us is the support. First it's usually slow or barely there at all and second most people charge for every little "customization" anyone comes up with. To us if it's something we are going to include in our product it's not a "customization" so we don't charge for it. Others do. This sets us apart in a big way.

There are numerous other little things that set us a part these are just a few of the bigger points.

john have you taken a look at ES to see how it compares with your software?

Brad refuses to show me the software. Fabian got a briefly look at it in Vegas and said from what he saw it really doesn't compare as far as features and configurablity. I'd love to see it myself, but again, I'm apparently not allowed :)

To continue from John's post (I'll try to keep this as short as possible):

We allow you to pay resellers based on: raw, unique, sale, rebill, full member, %-age of sale amount, %-age of rebill amount, %-age of dialer. You can setup as many programs as you like which payout on any combination of the above. Because we thought this is not enough, we deceided it makes perfect sense to let you pay differently on the different join options a surfer can pick. So if you want to, you could pay 100% of the initial sale of each trial membership but only 60% of the initial sale of each full membership to any given site. You could also pay $15 for a trial, $25 for a monthly membership, $55 for a 3 month membership. Of course, all these are just sample numbers.
And of course, you can change these numbers for single resellers at any time without changing their previous sale stats and without changing everyone else's payouts.

More on configurability: If you want, NATS controls your join form. On-the-fly, you can enable and disable single join options on the form, you can set the default join option preselected on the form, and of course, you can do all this per PROGRAM _and_ per RESELLER.

The popup/exit manager lets you easily setup exit consoles, follow me programs, special options on join forms (like a trial only when someone exits from the join form). You can target exit consoles based on reseller, program, site, country and langauge. You could for example turn off single exits for a reseller that complains but you do not want to lose the traffic.

Compared to everyone else out there, our cascading system is extremly advanced: You can setup any number of cascades. A cascade in NATS is simply a button on the join form people click to join. We can cascade anything: Cascade from Epoch CC to CCBill CC to WTS (ACH) to a Dialer. Geo-target whole cascades, so that a button disappears if the surfer is not from the US. This way you can put an ACH button on your join forms but have it only show if the surfer is from the US. But of course, you can also target single items IN the cascade. Turn of ACH in the above example if not in the US, or create a "NO-CC" cascade which uses ACH for US, ELV for Germany, Dialers for the rest of the world. The possabilities are seriously endless.
If you use Merchant Accounts instead of IPSPs we offer the only thing you can really call TRUE cascading. We can cascade between the merchant accounts in the background. If you have 2 CC accounts, the surfer enters the info once, and we try the first account and if denied we try the second account without reprompting the surfer for any information.

Our Admin Reporting tools are ever expanding, currently we offer: Profit/Loss Reports, Trial Reports, Retention Reports, Transaction Reports and of course (sorry Brad, you are not the only one) Fraud Reports. All of these reports are constantly reworked, changed and tweaked based on the feedback of our big number of clients.
We also offer Surfer Stats, so you can actually see things like, how often your Surfers go to the join page before they actually fill it out or go to the first biller. If you want, you can even track all your tour pages.

Another thing that, as far as I know, is totally unique to NATS is our Mailer system. This is not a simple bulk-mailer for members or resellers. We let you setup Mails and clearly TARGET them to certain members or resellers. Send mails to all resellers that joined 5 days ago but sent less than 100 uniques till today. Send mails to all resellers that just did their 50th sale. Send mails to all members. Send mails to all members that canceled 5 days ago. The possabilites are endless, and we are adding more targeting very soon to let you classify this even more.

Unlike all our competition, we do not tell you what reseller payment options you can offer to your resellers (Check, ePassporte, Wire...), you can configure them and add as many as you want. Each payment option can have its own dump format, which is, like everything else in NATS, templated so you can change it to your liking. Each payment option can have a different charge (if any) that you deduct from the total amount. Even if you want to add a weird payment option, no coding is needed. Either we or you, depending if you are comfortable doing it yourself or not, add a new table to the nats database, setup a new template for entering the data, and then add the type to the Pay Via Admin and enable it. Thats all thats needed, your resellers can now pick that payment option.
Of course, we have a few standard ones already ready for you that we can add at any time. (Check, UPS Check, ePassporte, Wire, International Wire).

And there is more....

There are a lot more options out there for affiliate software besides MPA and NATS. Both these programs are fantastic, but not the only script around.

Do your own research before jumping into anything.

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