CCBILL, very unlikely holes with no sales (screenshots)
 

Just talking to Paul from CCBILL here showing him a couple of screenshots from our mailbox where we recieve our CCBILL sales

Every now and then (every 5-10 day or so in average) we experience SUDDEN STOPS in CCBILL for hours and hours... these stops very often comes after a solid day with sales every 15-30 minutes.. and then STOP for 6-10 hours in a row .. and after this mysterious break the sales starts again, and very often as stabile and regular as before the hole (see screenshots)

Paul too think that these holes seems very strange

We have tried at least 10 times to make test signups during these holes, and they always come through.. for those we've been using 4 different danish VISA cards

We have no server downtime in these periods and the stats are for MANY sponsors so it's not sponsor server downtime either

Any ideas? I'm going crazy here, this pattern seems so very very unlikely, and we see it with no other sponsor (read : non-ccbill) that we promote. Sales from there are always pretty stabile during all the 24 hours in a day, which also shows me that the stuff in our end runs perfectly

Screenshot 1 (today) :
http://www.feelgoodspot.com/images/ccbillhole.gif

Screenshot 2 :
http://www.feelgoodspot.com/images/ccbillhole2.gif

innnnnnteresting..

Same here dude same here....

Tom

try a diffrent processor and see if the same pattern happens.

thats really shitty

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh scrubbing!

the funny thing is, that it has happened to me as well. I think that if a lot of people look they might see it in thier stats.

lol great pic franck

Damn, you still alive!?

I noticed a simliar type of pattern when I processed through Ibill. It turned out an employee over there was diverting sales to their own account.

Obviously I have no idea what's happening here, but ccbill should look into this as a possibility.

try another billing processor

Are they running transactions from a queue in batches?

:1orglaugh

It's common knowledge that ccBill is a "part time" processor.

ain't that sweet

Could be something due to a cron job in the affiliate software that you have.

If you are looking for holes in stats with CCBill, we don't see it in our stats. This is what our hourly sales graph looks like, for the last 4.8 million hits to our sites. There are obviously early morning hours (Arizona Time) that traffic and sales are both slow, but believe me, if CCBill wasn't processing sales for HOURS, I'd be ALL OVER IT.

http://www.lightspeedsupport.com/salesbyhour.jpg

Is it possible that the "holes" you are noticing aren't caused by delays in the signup email delivery? (could be a problem on either end)

Steve Lightspeed

Most likely that is when the DB is indexing itself and then resumes sending out emails again... But you normally would have 5 or 6 at the same time.

That's really interesting that you found that happening. Never really thought that could be an issue processors might have. I agree, I wouldn't say that's the case here, but your point is very interesting.

~Alli

I've always thought that they batch process sales.

no holes here either, constant flow all day, ok some days more then others but its not like there arent sales for like 5 hrs or so

have you looked a the times of the signups in the stats ?

I think its just the email it could be on your end as well if you know how email queueing works its just that queueing

if a server is to busy it gets behind similarly if it can't deliver your end it will retry sending the mail at every increasing intervals before it sends back a FAILURE

its probly that

Are the sales showing up in your stats program before you get the emails?

If you don't run a statsremote program are you able to see them in the ccbill interface while it's in the slump time?

Its weird that only affiliates notice this. Paysite owners dont seem to notice these holes.
This is not because of the amount of sales because Biskoppen and Gazool have more sales as affilates then a medium paysite has...
That might be a lead to the answer.
:2 cents:

Shap was complaining about something like that too not too long ago

Our stats reports look like Steve's. On very very very very rare occasions we've gone 1 hour max 2 with no ccbill sales at all. That's when I go bizerk LOL :winkwink:

Besides the email comment I have to make another. This industry is a numbers game. At certain numbers things stabilize. I remember when we were doing less than 100 signups a day the numbers would have LARGE variation. One day 96 the next 52. Same traffic but big drop in sales. I remember that everything under 75 a day was crazy. The variation made no sense to me. Looking back it seems to be a normal part of our industry.It's part of the growing process. The more you grow the less you'll see it. I'm sure Steve and others have experienced the same :thumbsup

We also thought of that because it seemed like a very likely answer, but the timestamps inside the mails (timestamp for the sale itself) matches in timestamps in our mailbox (+ our time difference)

Please notice that these sales are sales made as an affiliate, not as a paysite

Shaving.

The ebb and flow of sales is most pronounced when you have less than a 100 sales per day. Grow your sales and you will see that the diversification of your traffic sources smooths out the highs and lows of sales.

Steve, those numbers you put up are quite...uh...impressive. Your stats show about 5 million uniques in a 24 hr period. You running like 10,000 joins per day or something over there?

I usually woun't say something like that, but it could explain it.
It's not *that* hard to replace your ccbill_referer if one wanted to..
Do that every day with a cronjob, or sometimes..:Oh crap

biskoppen,
Have you checked with the sponsor you send most sales to if they can confirm the timestamps on your signups and if they can check during those 'dead hours' if they've received signups from you?

I could understand a one hour delay or batches coming in after one hour but 14 & 6 hour delays ... something doesn't sound right - moreso in your particular case.

haha - that screenshot had me running for my calculator too.

I understood that Steve pulled up the last 5 million hits, not 24 hour period. If he's doing 5mil a day in traffic DAMN that's SICK!

ON THE FLIP SIDE: We have all seen occasional days when you get a sudden burst of sales where you will do double than normal sales during a six hour period (for example).

So doesnt it make sense that occasionally you will have a day where for 6 hours you will get no sales?

The higher your daily average the less likely. (as stated in above posts)

If you were normally doing 100 sales a day(approx 4 per hour) it's less likely you would go 6 hours with no sale.

But if you normally do 25 sales a day (approx 1 per hour) it is more likely you could experience a 6 hour period without a sale.

~BV

interesting reading....