ONE HUNDRED CCBILL COMPLAINTS!

PS: I wake up to.......SALES SUCK AGAIN TODAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just sayin' - Jesus already.

A few months ago I would have said my sales were bad, but I've had more time available since and am seeing the benefit of the extra work I've put in.

One thing that I do notice with CCBill is that it seems like sales arrive at the same time. I check my stats far too often, they are like a drug to me, sometimes I check within 10 minutes of the last check, I need to stop it, but anyway this allows me to notice that normally my sales arrive together e.g. 12:37am no sales, 12:45am 2 sales and 2 rebills

It's your shitty websites - nothing to do with CCBill - please stfu already :uhoh

LOL

Man, you gotta go fuck yourself already dude.
Officially on IGNORE.

Carry on.

MisterPeabody:

Sending a request to add you on ICQ. Would like to discuss payment solutions with you.

Yesterday was a pretty normal day for me as far as CCBill goes in terms of sales and rebills.

We do however usually have one day or so a month where form submits will stop registering. In our case this month it was Oct 7.

So far it looks like a pretty average month.

excellent point....shitty websites convert with 50% join form submissions on tuesday....

then on wednesday shitty websites have 0% join form percentages....while back up shitty website processors have flurry of activity on wednesday...

Makes sense to me...shitty websites is the culprit...mystery solved!

I dropped ccbill last night. I checked stats at 11pm. We had epoch and ccbill at 50/50. Ccbill went 2.5 hours without a single sale meanwhile epoch was really rolling and made up for the ccbill drop. When I saw that I dropped ccbill and until I hear what was wrong they won't be getting any volume.

Btw it's 3pm est and we've already had more signups than yesterday.

Thanks for contacting me Mike! Let's touch base on this issue in January - I'm giving my processors til then to work this shit OUT. LOL :)

Thanks for that comment, LOL. Chronig is a pussy-ass whiner bitch who didn't like it when I ignored his amazing "advice" on how to improve my sales so now he stalks me in every thread and pisses on everything I say. Fuck him.

That's the thing tho - the 'argument" - when sales turn shitty: It's your sites, it's your traffic, it's this and it's that...yet no factors - NONE - have changed. So really, wtf already?

Hope your sales are returning?

That's funny you should mention that Shap! I was in the process of switching the old cascade-eroo when CCBill contacted me on ICQ. Told them what i was seeing, then ... "brb".

That was a couple hours ago. LOL So now it's switcheroo time.

NO VOLUME FOR UNDER-PERFORMING CC PROCESSORS. Shap said so. :)

That said as a backup ccbill picked up good volume in the last 60 minutes. Maybe check to see how your sales were :)

Shap,

I'd like to offer you a competitive quote for a direct merchant solution to work into your cascade rotation.

LOL funny i went to mobiuspay.com and got a godaddy page. Was expecting your site.

We are currently working with someone on this. If it doesn't work out I'll contact you.

Unfortunately, I've yet to put an informational site up yet. I mainly work as a private consultant for a narrow group and haven't really advertised publicly.

I look forward to hearing from you in the event you decide to explore your options further.

Cascade switched for app. 1 hour - 3 sales from Epoch. Last CCBill sale app. 3 1/2 hours prior to the switch. Go figure.

What happens if you complain too often to CCBill, Shap? Does CCBill get upset and question your motives?
Or do you do enough volume that they don't question Twistys?
Just curious.

We are up quite a bit but I would attribute that to affiliate traffic.

More than sales traffic is down the toilet at the moment it seems...

CCBill has nothing to do with this. I have may be only 3-4% of my sales through ccbill. But sales just suck in recent 2 days.

And to own your own members. You are leasing your members from ccbill/epoch
ds

I belive that something may be going wrong with the processing end. Like others who have posted, I've had shitty sales with only a couple of spikes. One of better performing programs I promote would typically average of 20 sign ups per period. This period, 2 sign ups. With that same program I consistently had a ratio of about 1:20. This period, 1:150. It all started on 9/26. :helpme

The way to test this is to have your tours go equally to your billing partners, in real time. You simply cannot switch out one for the other because there are too many variables.

Write a simple PHP script that effectively rotates between your billers -- 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, and so on. For any time period of the day each biller should get the same number of hits.

Even this requires sufficient volume from your join page (I'd say at least 5-10 an hour), and it won't be a true scientific test if you have cascading. You'll have to go through a day or two without cascading.

At the end of the test you'll know once and for all which biller is providing the better conversions. End of story.

Well.....end of Chapter 7, so to speak. :) There's more:

We have this script at MRPW, and have done tests like you described. Our better-performing sites can get dozens of hits an hour. Problem is: there are still many factors beyond a test's capabilities, factors like merchant accounts, the various and same banks processors may use and share, stock markets, currency exchanges, Visa being picky, nosy, upcoming elections therefore political hanky-panky and pressures...on and fucking on.

BTW: 9/26 is about when I noticed the disturbing "yo-yo" affect again (hadn't reared its' ugly head since mid-spring or so): One day UP, next day DOWN, next day UP, next day DOWN...and so on.

As my good friend Vjo says: "Ride the wave, baby, ride the wave..." or maybe that was Cunningstunt? No, too optimistic for him...Teencat? No, too gramatically correct for that (which also rules out FatFoo)....Jesus, too much time on GFY. Ciao.

cant complain

Same exact date I mentioned in my post, 9/26.

Who cares. These have nothing to do with whether CCBill is to blame, which is what this thread has become. The test is merely to show if one processor really outperforms another, not why.

If you divvy up the joins you send to your billers in an equal but random fashion, and do it in real time so the comparison is timely and current (not testing day to day, or week to week) you won't know the root cause of the slowdowns, but you can say for certain processor X outperforms processor Y.

This is how any real business would conduct these tests. They draw off customers at random, but all at the same time and place. Y'all are complicating what is really a very simple process.

Guess you missed the part where I said we did test this. I never said I didn't test the same time, day of week, etc. My point was, these other factors can have an affect on any 3rd party cc processer.

In other words, if testing would simply answer the issue don't you think a "real business" like Twistys (forget MRPW) would have their answer and not have to start threads publicly wondering WTF? Guess testing doesn't answer it then, does it?

I guess you missed the part where I said the test is to flatly determine if a processor is to blame. You said you ran the tests but since you still complain about strange sales days the conclusion has to be it's not the fault of the specific processor. It's one of these other things, and you are right, there are many things that influence a day's sales.

A/B tests are common in research and business. But you must pull from the same test group. You don't test one processor one day, and another the next, because those are different test groups. You don't switch processors when things start to look strange. Every time I read one of these threads this is what people are doing. Shap didn't say he's run A/B tests. He said he flipped the cascade after noticing a period of poor sales. That's inconclusive.

Or, just on the fundamental analysis side, I note Kickass still uses CCBill at the top of their cascade. They're pretty big, right? Either they accept these mysterious sales days as part of business, or they don't have them, or CCBill has a secret pact with them to not screw them over, like they supposedly do with everyone else.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying we should blindly accept results from third party partners and never question things. Questioning is good. But there are proven, established methodologies that can resolve these questions. If you've done A/B tests, it would be nice to know the (general) results. Include the length of the test, the size of the test groups, and what you discovered.

I mean, it's not like this information would help a competitor, but if whatever the outcome of your tests, it would provide some real facts among a lot of conjecture and outright fearmongering.

Tests:

A/B splits with CCBill and Epoch, over 5 days, 24 hours a day, 5 days straight.
Following week: 4 days of A/B testing 24 hours, 4 days straight.

Same results both times: When CCBill sales were down, Epoch sales were up, and vice versa.

We've also done speed tests on join form load times:
CCBill (average): 2.5 seconds
Epoch: 3.1 seconds (add the re-direct time to that, making for a total of 3.9 seconds; switch the cascade and similar time frames result with both processors)

Now i won't break down sales vs. percentages vs. etc etc etc. But the point is simple: We've done tests. This issue is not relegated to this week, either, so we've been "investigating" these odd patterns since around April-May.

To answer the other part: WHY some companies still use CCBill despite the above issues? Simple; CCBill IS reliable, they always pay on time, and, in my case, my Affiliate Program is a CCBill affiliate program. Finally, while getting my own merch account, or using NATS, or simply controlling the billing process more would be optimal, at the moment I'm more-or-less a single person, handling everything. So the idea of writing checks weekly to hundreds of affiliates doesn't thrill me. LOL Talk to me next year (2011) however, and if these "odd patterns" continue, and our tests show us that we're leaving thousands on the table by NOT fully controlling our own billing, then the situation shall change, trust me.

Your points are all good ones, BTW. It's just when one assumes we haven't tried someone's great suggestions, or when someone implies we're too stoopid to try testing I go all keyboard. LOL

many of the people posting and complaining in this thread would be better off if they spent more time worry about traffic.

IMO ofcourse

Just to followup, my sales came back today. After days of subpar perfomance I suddenly had a regular days worth of sales by lunch. Oh well, this week will end up only 10% lower than last week so I can't complain.

Update:
Came back with a roar this weekend! Made up for the rest of the week. Who knows? :thumbsup
Piper