Posted this in the Copeac thread as well since they're related:
Not taking sides here. But everyone knows the rebill world is in a very precarious state. Everything that is free trial related is such a careful balance. The days of doing whatever you want on the merchant side are done and things are being reigned in. No auto cross sells, upsells, high charge amounts monthly, etc. So it's made it quite the difficult situation for advertisers to make it back out. Where before they were profitable on month one to run more compliant with none of that stuff with the current cpa's it's at like month 2.5 now. Still profitable for them just nothing like it was. So I think that's why you're seeing these things happen. I wouldn't be surprised soon if you saw lengthening terms for rebill traffic as well. A lot of advertisers are making network carry the terms longer because they're not making up the money as fast and a lot don't have the money to float it.
From my understanding the margins have got very small on the advertisers side and they're still carrying a great deal of risk to keep the offers alive. I'm not saying they're going broke but as with anything in life there's a pain/pleasure motivating principle. And honestly I'm sure they were at the point where they were thinking well what do we do. We have a few choices:
A. we can shut it all down and collect our money and find something else to do.
B. we can scrub on the front end a certain % to everyone to make up for it.
C. we can be forth coming about the bad charges and handle it that way.
I'm curious what everyone thinks is the best. Their are still a lot of guys that are making good coin on these deals so even with the drama I'm guessing most of you don't want A. B could be done but then you have no knowledge of what's going on. Where with C you have transparency however can wind up in the hole at the end of the month.
Which do you chose?
I personally chose B. for myself as I know what my metrics are constantly and if it stops working I shut it down. I don't like C at all because it's an issue of I may run all month and then have a bunch of chargebacks from the advertiser and find out I lost money on a big campaign. Really I post this question more generaly to all verticals rather then just this specific situation. It's quite common in leads to have 5-10% of them refunded for non-working phone numbers. If I we come to an affiliate with that that's running a campaign and managing profitability they're going to get pissed so the question is what is the right way to handle these situations?
Back to the rebill thing. I'm not sure how many of you know this but the merchant accounts are kept alive by the volume going through. If the volume drops and the chargeback % from visa/mc start coming in from the last few months the ratio's get all out of whack and the merchant account goes down. At that point no one gets paid as there's no money to pay and no merchant account to rebill with. So along with trying to be fair to everyone they have to keep the volume up to keep cb ratio's inline or they can't bill and everyone gets fucked all along the whole line. So when you say why don't they just do..... make sure you're thinking of more then just yourself. It's not a battle of us against them. Don't just assume they're trying to screw you, they're just trying to keep their businesses alive the same as you.
P.S. I don't have any of these offers up through these advertisers currently ( advanced, optimum, int'l acai.... ) but have worked with them in the past. They do what they can to pay their bills and keep offers up so you can all keep making money.
