Print Article : Add a backup processor

Most, if not all tutorials I see are targeted to the affiliate side of the business, but there are extremely few tutorials for paysite owners so here's my modest contribution.

As many of you already know, not all signup requests are honored by CCBill (or any other payment processor, but this tutorial is especially for CCBill sites).
Some are declined for very valid reasons (card has been reported as stolen, not enough funds on the account, etc) but CCBill often also declines signups for other reasons.

The aim of this tutorial is to help you to "recover" some of those transactions which have been declined by CCBill.

The first thing you need to do is to go in your CCBill client interface and make sure you enabled signups from the countries that CCBill blacklists by default.

Procedure:

In the CCBill client admin interface go in the menu: Affiliates -> Setup -> Advanced Features
Then if it's not already the case, click on the "Enable" link for "Allow Blocked Countries".

Now we also need to provide a 2nd chance for people who have been declined for scoring issues to sign up on your website. "Scoring" is a generic term used to name a method used by credit card processors to determine if they're going to allow an otherwise legit transaction.
Among the parameters considered are:
- if payments made with the credit card have ever been charged back,
- the country which issued the card,
- is the card used from the country that issued it?,
- etc...

Also credit card processors process thousand of orders per hour and they (CCBill included) tend to "raise the bar" during the periods where there's a higher ratio of fraud. That means that an otherwise "legit" card may end up being occasionaly refused during a few hours or days.
For example, my personal VISA card that I used to sign up about 10 times on various CCBill sites has been refused a couple times when I tried to sign up on another CCbill site, but it worked again 2 days again (and no I never charged back any transaction and yes there was enough money on my account to cover the transaction).

As a site owner you have a way to see how often this happens by asking CCBill to send you an email each time a transaction is declined. Here's the procedure to enable it; Go in the menu:
Tools -> Account Maintainance -> Account Admin -> (drop down site list menu: select the site you want the change to apply on) -> Click on "Custom Emails" -> for each line: "Customize"

Then in the 'Client' column for the 'DENIAL' and 'FAILED' lines enter the following text: (If you have doubts about the usefulness of this tutorial, you can just stop here for now and see how often you get an email that says "Sorry, a surfer wanted to sign up, but CCBill declined the sale." I bet you'll come back to read the rest of this tutorial very quickly because it would really be silly to lower your income by 10% just to save a few hours of work)

Installing The Alternate CC Processor

Now to try to recover those "missed" sign ups we're going to set up an alternate payment processor. The solution described below definately doesn't replace a full-blown cascading billing system like NATS, but it's extremely easy and quick to set up and the extra sales really makes it worth to invest a couple hours to set it up.

My favorite backup payment processor is Verotel. This is a quite old company with a very good reputation, they always pay on time, most importantly they can process a very large part of the transactions declined by CCBill which is what we need in this context.

Sign up as a site owner at Verotel and install their site management software. Make sure you're using the same password file on your server for both Verotel and CCBill.
Don't worry, CCBill and Verotel check for the existance of a user name in the file prior to try to add it, so there's no risk of name collision. The technical procedure to install the Verotel Remote User Management on your site is really easy, but don't hesitate to ask Verotel's support for some help if needed.

A nice thing to do is to directly put a link on the "Join" page of your site to your alternate payment processor (Warning: putting a Verotel signup button on the join page used by traffic sent by your affiliates is considered -- and rightly so -- as sales shaving:

If you have affiliates, the best thing is to make 2 tours: one linked from your home/warning page (with the verotel link on the signup page) and another tour with no traffic/"processor" leak for your affiliate traffic.

Now, wouldn't it be nice to directly email the wannabe members and suggest them the alternative CC processor, because after having been declined many surfers probably won't bother going to your signup page again to see if there's an alternate solution.
Fortunately, it's actually quite easy to do from CCBill's interface.

Go back in the Tools -> Account Maintainance -> Account Admin -> (drop down site list menu: select the site you want the change to apply on) -> Click on "Custom Emails" menu and this time set up a nice email to be sent to wannabe customers who had their transactions declined, something along the lines of:

From now on, members who get declined by CCBill will get an email incitating them to try their luck again with Verotel and you'll see that quite often they will indeed join through Verotel.