Non Nats Users: so do you feel that not having your programs on a cascade arrangement like Nats has affected your bottom line?
Nats Users: What benefits did NATS bring to your program plan and bottom line profitability?
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Non Nats Users: so do you feel that not having your programs on a cascade arrangement like Nats has affected your bottom line?
Nats Users: What benefits did NATS bring to your program plan and bottom line profitability?
any self-hosted affiliate script (nats, mpa, etc) have pros and cons, but bottom line is that you will make more sales using a self-hosted affiliate script, now whether or not those extra sales cover the additional costs is an analysis you have to do.
Any other contributions??
(and thanks Luke for yours!)
No expert to be sure but will chime in on the original question.
CCBill also has a cascade billing option allowing surfers from other countries or bad credit history with CCBill to use alternate processors. The system is set up through CCBill so that affiliates are tracked and paid by CCBill regardless of who processes the sale.
As a budding affiliate, I like both NATS and CCBill sponsors due to reliable and flexible stats. As Luke said, the programs that tend to use NATS also have a better rep on many of the forums. Especially when it comes to on time payments and skimming. Who knows why?
I tend to promote mostly CCBill sponsors only because I'm small and can combine all my sponsor's sales together to obtain a weekly check. For the whales, a $500 minimum may be nothing but to a guy like me, hitting a $500 threshold for some sites would mean I virtually never get paid. I also like the NATS sponsors that have many sites with affiliate content in their program for the same reason. A few sales here and there adds up.
A lot of programs jumped on the NATs bandwagon because of the ability to cascade originally however, as Paul mentioned, now that CCBill (and Epoch) both have that same ability, there really isnt anything driving the 'need' for a program to utilize NATs other than the affiliates mis-belief that sales generated through the NATs system cant be shaved.
Personally, i much prefer the fact that i do not have to handle any of the affiliates earnings through Condom Cash, or pay to 'lease' the NATs system or even pay someone to handle payouts, for that reason alone, not having NATs up and running on Condom Cash and our upcoming programs means that our profitability is much higher long-term than any NATs based program could ever be.
Anything that will take away from a programs profitability is a bad thing, unless you can justify its expense in other ways.
As far as i can tell, having a little over 2500 affiliates on Condom Cash, so long as the program is stable, i really do not think having NATs or a similar system really is as important today as it might have been assumed by affiliates 2 or 3 years ago.
Regards,
Lee
Where did the $500 come from? Thats not NATS specific. That would be the program only.Quote:
Originally Posted by PUMPaul
Jimmy
Thats not really true. It takes less than 10 minutes to output our payouts and send the payments out to our payment processor. Fee isn't much compared to benefits. You could always charge your affiliates for it. Epoch affiliates pay $2 per check I believe anyway.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lee
All the combined reports you get greatly outweight the time and money you would spend in trying to combine and guess all your info from separate billers. We have 4 billing companies plus our own merchant account. Putting all those stats together is almost impossible. Plus all the customer data is in 1 place.
All the different rules that you can setup in NATS as far as who is cascading where, with what price, etc is much better than your options with CCBill and Epoch's cascading features.
Plus you can control specific affiliate accounts. If the affiliate wants to try a special pricing with you, you can adjust all their links to show that pricing in seconds.
Their lease pricing isn't that bad. The first tier is $150 for 300 sales. Thats 2.5% if you have only $20 sales($6000). Again, back to the value of the reports.
And as far as affiliates, most programs are not setup correctly to use the cascading features with Epoch and CCBill to benefit the affiliate. Its not as simple as setting up a NATS tour for cascading.
All that there is enough to validate for us a reason to be on NATS. There are many more features that I didn't list.
I think that programs should use their own system or a system like NATS to maximize their earnings, especially if they use multiple billers and tours.
Jimmy
Correct Jimmy, that is program specific. Most of the programs I've looked at using NATS have payouts in the $500 range but have seen a few with as low as $50. Sorry about jumping topic in the middle of a topic specific discussion.Quote:
Originally Posted by nicedreams
i say with NATS you're buying an instant degree of integrity... when i see custom programs all i can think about is how easily they could be screwing me
Thanks Jimmy and to everyone else for such detailed replies! It's very much appreciated. Kmanrox: While there is some "instant stability" associated with Nats, I've also read where webmasters will only work with CCBill programs.
I think my real question boils down to: If a guy is just starting out (launching new sites and program) should Nats be considered a "must have" in the expense column from the get go? Or, can a program be developed with what's available from say CCBill and that CCBTools website, and still be comparably successful?
I would start with CCBill and a good set of promo tools. To test your program and sites first to see if they work, then expand to NATS.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bec
Jimmy
actually, thats not true at all, for so many reasons. Here's a few off the top of my head:Quote:
Originally Posted by Lee
- ccbill lets you cascade only with epoch and segpay, I believe epoch only lets you cascade with ccbill and forces epoch as the primary. What about all the other billing companies?
- you cannot cascade using your own merchant account on either of these, using your own merchant account will save you somewhere between 7.5 - 12% on your fees and will result in more signups being approved, I estimate you will make a good 20% easy
- you cannot cascade to a good phone biller like gxbill or passwordsbyphone, adding a good phone biller will make you an extra 10% easy
- you cannot use your own geotargeting systems to automatically offer the best payment options possible for that particular country
- you cannot offer new billing methods as they emerge, like from 2000charge (very good with asian and other alternative billing) or webbilling (euro and usa debit) or other companies specialising in sms billing, pay per minute billing, etc.
- if you chose to accept cheques, you are locked into ccbill (or epoch) systems for cheques, there are other pay-by-cheque systems out there that charge you a lot less fees, thus saving you more fees
- nats / mpa / etc not only give you an affiliate tracking system, they also give you an entire affiliate system that allows you to easily offer affiliates loads more, like displaying or dumping hosted galleries with the affiliate link, mailers that include affiliate links in them, embedded flash videos with the affiliate link, etc. The only way to do this with ccbill is to buy another system like ccbill tools (is that the one?) or custom create one yourself.
I am not putting down ccbill or epoch, I actually think they have made amazing strides forward with their cascading offerings and alternative billing solutions. And both are solid top-notch processors. But what I am saying is, at this point, there are still a lot of definitive advantages to running your affiliate program on your own nats/mpa/etc affiliate system.
Right but, when NATS first launched, the reason was because TMM promoted it as 'shave free' on all the boards, THAT is the only reason people flocked to NATs after flocking to MPA a few months before, especially as NATs timed their launch along with the 'leak' that MPA had a built-in 'shave' feature.
If that perfectly timed 'leak' about MPA having the shave feature built in had never happened, NATs would be nowhere near where they are right now in popularity.
Regards,
Lee
well for my first site when i get the $750 together that i will be charged i think i am just going to use epoch verotel or ccbill which one do you think will be bestest to use i do not want to have to use all 3 and get charged that money for each one just to have 1 paysite of my own!
There are reasons to get NATS, and there are reasons you should absolutely not get NATS.
Unfortunately, you will never hear of the reasons not to get NATS in a public posting on a board, because NATS threatens to sue into oblivion anyone who publicly mentions the problems. There are, however, a number of programs that had NATS and switched to something else. Given the effort involved in making the switch, one would assume there's a good reason.
Anyone who has worked extensively with NATS is probably aware of the issues, and some of them might even tell you privately :)
Now see, that's the rub, promo tools for CCBill is that http://CCBtools.com ... and their pricing is the same as a month's lease for NATS. So there's no savings really on the first year of startup costs.Quote:
Originally Posted by nicedreams
Chip, this is why I prefer to respond to these posts saying "nats / mpa / etc" to show that there are options :D
oh, by the way, I have noticed that TooMuchMedia has been trying a lot harder helping out in the last 9 or 10 months, their support is quick and friendly and they even ask for feedback on tickets now so that they can learn and improve.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gaybucks_chip
Well it's about time you showed up!! What's goin' on in the world of Chip these days?
Hi, Bec! Thanks for the thoughts... just super busy on a couple of rather large projects so not a lot of time to post until we have the new things ready to go.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bec
CCBTools is not a ccbill product, though I've heard a lot of good things about it. However, the CCBill WMS-5 which seems to be in permanent beta, does have a lot of similar features to NATS as far as marketing for affiliates. And it's free :) I bet if you ask, you can probably get added to the beta.
There's also a CCBill marketing add-on product called ccbuddie which I haven't used, but is dirt cheap (under $100 i think) and claims to offer a lot of features. I don't know anyone who has used it, but have toyed with getting it since it's so cheap, just to play with. It may have been supplanted by WMS-5.
And yes, I agree that NATS support has improved about a hundredfold in the past 6 or 9 months. However, this does not alleviate the issues I was referring to.
damn, i've never seen one that was that high at all. they're usually $50 to $100.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PUMPaul
I'd have to go back and look to find the specific programs as I didn't join them. A number of programs don't show the minimum payout on the webmaster FAQ or even in the TOS. I had to send e-mails to find out the payouts or ask other affiliates who promoted those sites. I did join a few NATS programs that have smaller payouts and multiple sites. Like Jimmy said, those numbers are set by the program owners so I don't think it is a reflection on NATS itself.Quote:
Originally Posted by basschick
This was a good thread Bec. Reading throught this I'm wondering if there is a site or other resource that shows a side by side comparison of the different types of programs CCBill, NATS, Verotel, EPOC, etc. Someone earlier mentioned that NATS has some issues but I'm sure every program has its ups and downs in different areas.
CashKaboom has a $500 payout limit for check payments.
Regards,
Lee
Thanks Lee.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lee
I would have spent all day tinking about it. There were a few others as well although those programs were the minority of the mix.
On a personal side note - it was actually the sponsors that took the time to answer e-mails and explain the payout systems that I ended up joining. A few sponsors, (Ben at hunkmoney and Jimmy at Nice Dreams for example) have even sent follow up e-mails to be sure everything was clear.
Some affiliates want to get paid faster and to Epassporte or other online system, that CCBill and Epoch not do...
more detailed stats affiliates get with NATS, for example they can create campaign for each site of even banner.
How I know the main reason why affiliates choose to work via CCBill directly is secure feeling that they get their payment, but if sponsor are also trustable, then with NATS is more comfortable.
Glad you're finding it educational Paul, and thanks for participating!Quote:
Originally Posted by PUMPaul