I'm about to take down ACH billing...

[xenigo]

Basschick,
I'm processing with Epoch. I have an account with WTS Billing but I haven't used it because of the issue of integrating Epoch and WTS into a single affiliate program, I'd have to run some sort of affiliate software backend on my site. The key feature of WTS is that they do not charge for uncollected funds.

[MWCren]

Online Checks totally suck as a join option. There is no real fraud scrub capacity with any processor and the scammers and freeloaders have learned that you can join and get a few days access for free with them. You can put in a legit routing number, but a fake account number or a bogus name/address that would never match an account and it gets approved. 3 to 5 days later it gets revoked.

With the widespread availability of debit/check cards, its just not worth the nightmare anymore of offering it as a join option.

Until someone comes up with a decent way to instantly verify checking account information, dump online checks.

[gaybucks_chip]

I''ve been appalled at how crappy the scrub for checks is on ccbill (who apparently uses WTS for their check processing). I've had check transactions returned from what is obviously the same user (same IP address) with a bogus address where the zip didn't match the city name, and a 2nd join from the same IP with a totally different city/state/zip combo. They don't even seem to verify that the city or streetname exists, and that isn't difficult to do in this day and age.

I am told that both WTS and Electracash have a higher-tier fraudscreening option that requires a SSN or birthdate or something and then uses that to match against a database to at least determine that the person is real. It costs another 30-40 cents/transaction or something... and we may try that.

We have, over the course of a year, about 30% bad checks. But of the remaining 70%, I suspect that at least a fair % of them don't own debit cards. This is based on what we know about retail buyers of our DVDs, many of whom are guys in their 50s, 60s and older.

I think that we're going to give the check-with-verification thing a shot and see what it does for us. It will probably cut down on check conversion, since people won't want to give up the personal info, but I'm wagering that it will drastically cut bad checks.

Also, Holly from Electracash tells me that they have just agreed to change their policy to pay only on collected funds, at the same rate they are currently charging, which would make them a much better deal than WTS. We'll see, when the final contract comes through, whether that actually happens.

[robin]

I used to work for a major retail store. They dumped accepting checks about 10 years ago because the fraud rate is too high. They even implimented some pretty "sophisticated verification methods" before they made the final decission.

[Lee]

Ouch!

Thats the one problem using online check payments, out of interest, have you checked out http://www.123bill.com?

Regards,

Lee