You Opinions...did Ccbill Fuck Up????
 

So for the past month or so I have seen a small decrease in sales to 2 of our sites (which happened to actually be joined into one pass file so members of one can have access to the other) When checking the ccbill admin I noticed only recurring memberships happening. I took really no notice of it....just figured maybe sales are slow.

I get an email from a customer trying to join for the first time and he says it isn't letting him because any user/pass combo he tries is invalid!

So I forward the email to clientsupport to look into it. The reply back claiming that all is working fine to tell the customer to clear his cookies.

That was it for that.

2 weeks go by.....only recurring memberships for these 2 sites STILL taking place, meanwhile traffic to them is growing! Something is fishy!

I today get another email from a customer with the same problem as the other guy!

So I call CCBIlL to look into it again. It turns out my permissions on the password file weren't set right and no new clients were able to join!!!!!! WTF!
Only recurring memberships went through which made it seem to me that people WERE able to join when really they couldn't!

So who is responsible? Shouldn't they compensate me somehow for a HUGE loss?? Your opinions? I don't know how I should be feeling right now.....

CCBill fucked up. Unless somehow you changed the perms on the pwd file then you're at fault. I'm sure CCBill has some sort of clause in the contract that keeps then from being held responsible though.

I dont know if its their fault, every time I've worked with CCBill, they had me set the permissions on the files myself.

Looks like it only prevented from new clients to access your site , not denied from them to pay for new subscription , so what's the loss here exactly ?

No I did not set permissions myself.....why would you set anything yourself when they install it all for you?

Elron, actually clients were unable to join because when they are asked to enter a username/pass combo it comes up invalid, therefore they are unable to proceed to the next step of actually finishing the transaction. They never pay! They can't register!

I have had the prevention of clients entering happen before when the passfile crashes. That is a different story. Yes then they can still sign up. In this case, they were never able to complete the sign up process!

have you spoken to anybody at ccbill about this yet? or were you just asking for the publics general opinion?

if you had not spoken to anybody at ccbill yet or if you did, but you did not agree with the answer and that is the cause of this thread, icq me, ill make sure that this gets looked at thoroughly

45471840

Corvette, I hit you up when you get a chance to check ICQ.

Like I said to you there the reason for my thread is
1. to see how anyone else would feel if they were cut sales for an "indefinite" amount of time (CCbill's reply to how long it was down) and if they asked CCbill to make sure everything is working and they said everything is fine, even though it isn't, AND what someone in my shoes would do about it.
Remember they cost me an average of 30-40 sales per day for at least the past month or so!

2. I wanted to let everyone know what happened so that they are aware of the issue if they are having the problem themselves. Double check all your stuff that is being processed by CCbill. Make sure it's all working properly!

tough call.... the 'support' people there should have looked at the original problem a bit more thoroughly.... permissions on a password file is not a needle in a haystack problem.

but,

you also have access to your server and any FTP program lets you view/change permissions at any time.

I'm sure CCBill will take care of you though, they are good people :)

*edit - just read you had this problem for a month? Jesus, who is your webmaster? Hard to sympathize with you babe.

I know it doesnt help any but letting users pick thier user/pass is a bad idea and typically a big security risk.

dvd316....

Permission to a file that was working just fine for a long time but suddenly changes is the last thing I would have thought about when seeing a drop in sales! You think of everything else, promotion, traffic, design, site issues and problems. I would have figured it out if at least it wasn't writing the recurring memberships! But that made it look like the passfile and all that aspect of it was in tact.

And keep in mind I HAD THEM LOOK INTO IT! THEY SAID IT'S FINE THEMSELVES!!!

I'm not trying to bash ccbill here but some of the people over at support needs to wake up.. but thats basically a problem for a lot of companies.. tons of people just getting by that day and not caring about what they actually do or don't..

Yep, they fucked up.

I am speaking to a manager right now and he says he will look into it.

Bottom line here is not to BASH anyone. Ccbill ARE good people and they do alot of good things. Really my point is to see if anyone else had this problem, and how they went about solving it, as well as making people aware that this CAN happen, so check your system and make sure it's working!

hmmmmmmm unlucky ann

Seems to be that someone at ccbill dropped the ball big time if it was "obvious" no new sales were coming in... But who's at fault?? I sort of think both sides.. ccbill didn't do a thorough job of checking and you should have been all over this instead of letting it slide IMO.

you should so be processing with epoch

exactly the point I made :2 cents:

hmm thats why my annangel ratio was more than double :(

I would think after 2 weeks of no new joins you would at the very least do a test sign up. :2 cents:

Test and chek every thing thats the way :2 cents:

Odd, i've had permission issues, it doesnt stop ccbill processing, just there script from creating a username/password which is problably why they emailed.

So you're saying you lost 30 - 40 sales/day and didnt investigate it further until a month had passed? So you lost 1200 sales due to this error? Riiiiiiight :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

FWIW, my experience with ccbill is that when you call in the evening or the middle of the night, you get one of three people who are all extraordinarily knowledgeable, thorough, and helpful.

If you call during the day, they have a much larger support staff, which range from absolutely amazing (Emmanuel) to people who give blatantly wrong info that should be really obvious. No fault on CCBill for this; I know it's a lot harder to staff with 100% competent people when you need 10 or 20 of them than when you need 1 or 2.

If I have an issue that can wait, I always call at night and speak with Brandon or Josh. There's never been an issue they couldn't solve. If I have to call during the day and it's a simple issue, it gets handled no problem. If it's complex, and the answer sounds questionable, I'll just call back and get someone else. But most of our stuff isn't time critical and by waiting till the evening, I'm dealing with a known quantity and never have any problems.

Basically its your business, the ultimate responsibility is yours to ensure everything is working correctly and if ever in doubt, check it yourself. Join your own site and see if its working. You may have people unstall scripts for you or what ever, but its your business, you lose if things do not work correctly, the responsibility is all yours.

making sure your signup and password management work is part of being a webmaster, one of the most basic part.

its also a bad idea not to let them choose their own, you have to many pissed off members who cancel because they cant remember their password, support requests asking for passwords and everything else. I prefer to choose my own login and pass for anything I do, so I think my members feel the same.

30-40 a day - and you did not notice it? by lunchtime I would have been knee deep into investigating it and would not have settled with a "clear your cookies". Even if I had to signup for my own site I would have done it to see if its all working fine. I dont think there is any webmaster on here that would not do what ever it took, to find out the problem is sales stopped comming in and customers complained they could not join.

First you said a small amount of sales per day and then you say 30-40. I dont see how it could go 2 months before noticing it.

30-40 a day? Went on for weeks? Not CCBills fault at all in my book. No matter how bad their support is, your own has to be 30-40 times worse to not notice that within an hour or two.

I would log into my server and check to see who was the last person to midify that file, then research the ip of that person

I'm with you.. how did you not notice this?

Aside from the fact you were down dozens of sales per day, do you use no stats whatsoever?

How did you not notice tons of people hitting the username page and not continuing? Your "abandoned cart" ratio jumped to 100%.

Yeah.. that doesn't really add up.

Small decrease becomes no new joins were able to go through? And previously you were averaging 30-40/day?

I track average sales per hour, and have a median and standard deviation for every hour of the week.

If it goes outside of the std dev, I start researching. :2 cents:

the file is on your server I would say thast your issue... not ccbills... a test signup does not write anything it just checks the proscessing

Don't forget that while new members weren't able to be added, that expiring members were likewise probably unable to be deleted... Might want to check that out too.

wonder if it happened to alot of people because my ccbill stats went to shit in the past month

i don't see how the permissions file got changed suddenly.. it had to be someone/something on her server that did it.

if it was ccbill that logged in and screwed it up, sounds like they owe some money.

anyone else, this isn't ccbill's problem.

my question is why would ccbill have access to anyones server to change file permissions?
I dont use them but I dont see why anyone would give someone else that access all the time

Actually, the exact same thing happened to me a couple weeks ago for http://www.IDreamOfJana.com but I caught it the same day. Not sure how the permissions on the PW file got changed. I changed it back and thought nothing of it. Hmm...

No idea. I've never used CCbill either, but she said they installed it.. so I assume d the ccbill user's access wasn't revoked - for maintenance and such.

that seems to make this a bit more interesting.. anyone else?

can i plead the 5th?

i dont send much traffic to ccbill sponsors but i wondered if something was up with sales myself, it's as if they just quit coming in and i know i had some links that were se and they should get sales even with a small amount of traffic, at least they were before

100% correct. Shit happens and mistakes can be made by anyone but leaving it 2 weeks until you realise there is a problem is pretty slow.

Ann-Angelcom - if you see a transaction on your ccbill stats that says "recurring", that is not a rebill - it's a new sale. are you talking about rebills or sales that say recurring?

a couple times over the years i've had permissions change in my server. did my host do it? did i somehow do it before i had a clue? who knows? but there are ways that permissions can change that don't involve ccbill.

any time you see a drop in sales and you want to check fast and easy if passwords are being generated, just create a password in the ccbill admin area and try to log in. it's easy, it's very fast and you don't have to wait for ccbill support.

and if you have a question, pick up the phone or use icq. i've never had a problem receiving a quick and easy response from ccbill by email, but when i need quick help i don't wait around - i call them or talk to corvett.

:thumbsup

They offer trials singles and recurrings which show up in different columns in the admin.