EPOCH/Paycom - Responds to inquiries regarding iBill

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Originally posted by djdez
No they did not! They made a press release in order to answer / relieve the amount of phone calls they are receiving about the situation.

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Oh please, you're assuming that just because someone claims to be getting phone calls that they're actually getting phone calls. I wrote on one of my galleries, "Okay guys, please stop e-mailing me for more pictures of this guy, here's some more, but it's all I've got." I never got a single e-mail, it was just a lead in for a new gallery.

This is business pure and simple. You can put whatever spin on it you want. No big, giant company out there gives a fig about you, they care about your money. Bounce doesn't care if your family thinks you're great because their clothes are soft and smell good, Mattel doesn't care if all the kids think you're cool because you have the latest Barbie, and Paul Morris wants us to believe that their trying to prevent kids from smoking.

It's all hooey. It's all about the dollar. Let's hope this all gets back to normal soon and there's still an iBill option out there to work with.

cheers
Dzinerbear

As a webmaster with ibill I have this to say:

All ibill webmasters are being kept up to date.
If you are with ibill just log in to your cmi and you can read whats being quoted on here with out the chinese whispers or 3rd party input.

All this thread is doing is pouring fuel on a fire.
Let the people concerned try and put out the fire and limit the damage to all of us in the adult industry.

The more this is contained the better for everyone.
It does not need to be splashed all around the internet.
As mentioned above all ibill webmasters are being kept informed,
in the appropriate place.

Hopefully in a few days it will all be old news!

letting people know what's going on is nice, but it would have been nicer if the problem had been taken care of.

anyway, i want to hear from rand about the bank thing - my sites are with epoch, and so are many of my sponsors' sites.

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Originally posted by basschick
letting people know what's going on is nice, but it would have been nicer if the problem had been taken care of.

anyway, i want to hear from rand about the bank thing - my sites are with epoch, and so are many of my sponsors' sites.

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Bass Chick (and others)

We are under contractural agreements not to disclose who we bank with. This is better for everyone involved including the bank, Paycom, and each and every webmaster that processes with Epoch.

Know that Paycom is with one of the largest banks in the world, has secured processing agreements, and is quite frankly the strongest and most stable it has ever been. I can not elaborate more about this and can not give specifics due to the legal agreements we have in place.

Our US banking agreements are secure and we are in full compliance with all card association and banking rules.

By the way....

You really shouldn't miss this post which talks a little more about Visa regulations and things all webmasters need to keep in mind.

thanks, rand. i wasn't asking WHO you bank with - just wondering if you have a secondary merchant account with another bank.

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Originally posted by basschick
thanks, rand. i wasn't asking WHO you bank with - just wondering if you have a secondary merchant account with another bank.

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We have *multiple* back ups.

I'm confused. Now NetBilling is saying something completely different.


Hello everyone,

Netbilling has been receiving an influx of calls, emails and ICQs about people wanting to setup their own merchant accounts for product sales and memberships because of recent events. While I am in no way discounting 3rd party processing, there are many misconceptions about the differences between 3rd party processing and processing through a payment gateway such as Netbilling. We very often refer merchants to CCbill and others when we cannot help them, as they do us.
This will surely clear some things up. Netbilling charges only 1.5% and 15¢ per transaction or 45¢ flat rate (your choice depending on your average ticket) for credit card processing (in addition to the merchant account rates). Merchant account fees range from 2% to 7%, depending on what you are selling and where you are located, of course.

Our check processing costs only 3.25% and 40¢ per transaction with no merchant account required of course. We also have a 24/7 call center option which not only will handle your customer service but will provide complete inbound and outbound telemarketing services as well. Many merchant experienced in the past that if they had their own merchant account, they would need to provide their own processing interface, fraud scrubbing, and customer service. This is what got us started back in 1998. We wanted to provide all of those services for merchants with their own account without taking on the risk of third party processing. This makes our merchants very comfortable knowing that Netbilling is not at risk in losing their merchant account and going under as so many have over the past few years. If a merchant has problems and loses their account, it does not effect any of our other merchants in any way.

If you are a merchant selling adult or mainstream products and are located in the US, Netbilling can help you establish a merchant account and processing usually the SAME DAY! ***As a matter of fact, if you mention I said so when you contact us, we will waive our usual $199 setup fee and the $45 bank app fee. *** We also provide a complete free shopping cart system for credit card and ACH/check processing or you can use an existing cart system such as Miva, Oscommerce, X-cart and many others. If you are located offshore we can help with product sales as well. However, the processing rate is higher at the offshore bank.

For paysites, we can setup merchant accounts both domestically and offshore and the total startup cost is approximately $2k which includes the Visa and Mastercard high risk registration fees. There is no reg. fees for Discover, Amex or JCB.
For adult paysites setup time is approximately 2-4 weeks realistically by the time the bank and Visa approve the sites.
Please note: IT IS ABSOLUTELY OK TO PROCESS WITH A THIRD PARTY (IPSP) PROCESSOR AS A SPONSORED MERCHANT AND HAVE A MERCHANT ACCOUNT FOR THE SAME SITES, JUST AS IT IS OK TO HAVE THE SAME SITES REGISTERED WITH 2 IPSPS AT THE SAME TIME. We often get merchants that switch to us or use us as the primary processor over third party processors. While you start new sales and rebillings with Netbilling, you current customer will remain at your current IPSP unless they will release the customer data for import into our system.
The nice thing is, once you have your merchant account setup, you can use additional processors with the same merchant account without having to pay the Visa and Mastercard registration fees again, in case you want to setup a backup processor/gateway.

If you are questioning whether you volume is high enough to justify your own merchant account... If you are processing more than $1000 per month, have a business DBA, LLC or corp, decent personal credit, and a business checking account, you are good to go. For offshore, you must have an EU corp. to work with one of our banks and have decent established monthly volume.

If not, we suggest using an IPSP (3rd party processor).


Thank you, Mitch Farber
661-252-2456
mitch@netbilling.com
ICQ: 117496436

Cont...


Advantages to having your own merchant account and using a gateway such as Netbilling include lower transaction fees (compared to 3rd party processing), same day payouts for domestic merchants and weekly for offshore. You will also typically get higher conversion ratios due to the fact that you can set the scrub levels for your own sites, and control over your customer's data with the ability to export all customer data to another processor (whch is a big deal in the current climate).

Disadvantages include the fact that you must do your own affiliate payouts (or use the payout service by affiliatetracking.net or another) and answer to chargeback retrieval requests.

If you do not keep your chargebacks under 1%, you stand the possibility of losing your merchant account, just as with using an IPSP.

Almost all outside affiliate programs work well with our system such as Affiliatetracking (Taboorevenue), X3, MPA3, NATS etc...

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Again, I am not discounting 3rd party processing in any way. Some of my good friends in this industry work for or own third party processing companies.

Not sure if we left anything out here. Questions or comments?

Thank you, Mitch Farber

disadvantages of your own merchant account include thousands of dollars to set up, plus the possibility of being turned down for merchant account,

your bank will charge you about 5.5% interest for a high-risk merchant account and then you also pay netbilling to do your customer service and negative database, so it costs around 7% plus 45 cents per transaction. for a lower-cost paysite, that could work out to be almost as much as a third party biller, and the setup is much higher.

also it is a very big advantage to new affiliate programs to have a known third party biller do their payouts.

the advantages are certainly there - more money, more control of how you deal with deadbeats. and i have always heard very good things about mitch and netbilling.

I would say that if you have 1-3 sites, using a 3rd party processor is the way to go. No fuss, no muss. If you have more sites then that it's good to get your own merchant accounts. However, you should also have accounts with 3rd party processors just incase something happens to you main processor or incase you want to give people other billing options if they are turned down by your main processor.

SO, your both right. :specs:

I agree with you there Andy!

It's something that we're looking into. Getting the 2nd and 3rd. Just a little hard to get them to intergrate with our system without having to buy some $17,000.00 program.

A full 100% of the Paycom supporters in this thread currently process with them. LOL...

So much for impartial opinions.

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Originally posted by BDBionic
I most definitely hope things sort themselves out when it comes to IBill. But, to be honest, I hope things get sorted out with them for sake of the people that process with them, not IBill themselves.

I wrote an article for Cybersocket earlier this month (that'll be published in the Oct issue) on the value of having backup processors and redundant processing options in place exactly for circumstances like this. That's what I'd simply advise everyone to do. And funny enough had no idea any of this was going on when I wrote the article. This is as good a time as any to consider it. Never wise to have all your eggs in one basket.

But if IBill's worst case scenarios as presented in their legal arguments materialize, that's their fault. And any webmaster should be eager and pleased to know that their are other processors out there who are watching what's taking place and ready for their business because 1) backup processors is just a plain and simple good idea 2) if IBill goes down as a result of their own negligence, people shouldn't be stuck to suffer at their mercy.

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It's strange, I think it was about a month to 1-1/2 months ago that I posted here that my processor told me I should have a back up processor. When I posted that here the reponses I got, as I recall, were telling me that I should find someone else to be me primary as that doesn't sound like good advice from a processor. Not having dealt in the adult, retail or internet industries, I really didn't know what to do. I guess I just got my answer.

I do have a question about having a back up; practically speaking, when you submit an application, do you tell them they will be a back up and that you don't intend on using them unless there is a problem with your primary processor?

Do you make sure to choose, as the back up processor, one that will integrate with the gateway you use for your primary processor, or do you have a back up gateway ready?

Thank you in advance for your opinions.

Tony