CCBill has made it's mark in this industry. If you ask me they are amongst the top three payment processors available to adult webmasters today. I personally used them for over a year a while back when they were fairly new. Then their service was top notch, since then, they've come a long way offering all the services you could want in an third party processor. A great team, awesome service and simple as 1-2-3, I am honored to have my shot at a one-on-one with Kim, one of the driving forces behind the CCBill service. Always a pleasure, here is what she had to say in this Cozy Frog exclusive...
C-Pimp: So excited to finally get a chance to do this interview with you. I wanna thank you for taking some time off your daily hectic schedule to do this interview for Cozy.
Can you start off by telling the readers a little about yourself, how you got started in this business and about your position at CCBill?
Kim: Actually I started a few years ago as a typical freesite webmaster – building sites, working on ways to get traffic, and of course ways to get good sales with my sponsors. I went to work at Cashquest handling the marketing and webmaster support for about a year, then moved to CCBill. My actual title at CCBill is Vice President of Marketing, but I do just about anything that clients need for any of our companies, CCBill, Cavecreek, CCBucks.
C-Pimp: CCBill has been around for a few years now and most definitely doesn’t need much of a introduction for most adult webmasters online today. But for the newbies coming into this business everyday, can you give us a quick history on CCBill and where it stands today in terms of services offered?
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"Stats are important, there is no doubt about it, but transactions are the key to everyone making money and we protect those boxes very carefully." |
Kim: CCBill and Cavecreek started off really small, Cavecreek pretty much was started to share bandwidth costs. CCBill grew out of the idea of managing payment solutions for smaller companies, ones that wouldn’t want to invest the time or money into their own merchant accounts or the tools it takes to support them. Over time, it’s really turned into the core of our business – while we still host a lot of the top adult companies, Cavecreek allows us to have 24 hour control over CCBills bandwidth, something we think is crucial to running a good operation.
C-Pimp: The signup process you guys have setup for new webmasters looking for a processor is as easy as it gets. How long would it normally take for a webmaster to have his account setup and start accepting orders on his/her site?
Kim: If a webmaster has both the tour and the members area built we can have them up and running in about a day, as long as their site passes our TOS check. Sometimes we will request changes, and some we just decline to process for.
C-Pimp: How much does CCBill hold on each transaction for processing fees and any other security measures such as chargebacks? How much do you cut from the webmaster?
Kim: Fees start at 14.5% of gross sales and drop from there, based on volume. Chargeback reserve is 5%, 180 days rolling, which means you recover your reserves weekly from the period 6 months prior. Checks and credit cards pay the same fees and site owners have the option of paying the fees out of their percentage or splitting them based on percentage they split with their resellers.
C-Pimp: How often do you send out payments to your webmasters? Aside from checks, do you offer other alternatives for quicker payments such as bank wires and what fees do you charge for that?
Kim: Checks and wires go out weekly, every Monday, unless there is a US bank holiday.
C-Pimp: Over the past couple of years your online stats have improved quite a bit, offering your webmasters an array of real time statistics to help them monitor they earnings. What kind of system do you guys use to track everything and ensure it’s reliability?
Kim: Our system is based on a network of separated servers – separated by the functions they serve. For instance, front end transactions are run on several boxes that are not touched by anything else – that way our transaction time stays good. Stats, accounting, a few other things are all separate clusters of boxes and we replicate data across them. What this does is enables us to keep the transaction volume running even if the stats servers, for instance, have problems. Stats are important, there is no doubt about it, but transactions are the key to everyone making money and we protect those boxes very carefully.
C-Pimp: On another note, I was real happy to meet you and the CCBill staff at the last convention in Vegas, the one thing that I took back from that experience, was how gracious and kind the entire team was. Working with a group like that can only bring the best out of any service…how many cool cats makeup the entire CCBill team?
Kim: LOL – I look at our entire staff as part of the team – everyone from surfer phone support to sales to accounting etc. We’ve got around 150 employees – the bulk of which is support staff – and everyone works pretty well together. We have a profit sharing plan that really pushes everyone to help the clients, regardless of them being paid commission on an account or not.
C-Pimp: Do you guys offer a system that would work for webmasters interested in offering an affiliate program on their sites? Does CCBill handle all stats for all members including all the payouts?
Kim: One of our core services is the reseller program – we manage the stats, the payouts, it’s just as simple as clicking a few options in the site owner admin and it’s good to go.
C-Pimp: Do you offer third party online checking or phone billing services? Any plans on offering them sometime in the future?
Kim: We do US checking/ach currently, have for quite some time. We don’t offer phone billing, aren’t going to do phone billing for memberships, but we do have a brand new agreement with Profit Plantation to offer their dialer solutions as an alternate processing method to our clients. We are talking with other companies as well about Euro and Asian solutions and possibly some micro payment type situations too. If CCBill can’t get a good join with the surfers credit card or check, then we want to be able to tell our site owners to try something else, not to lose the surfer entirely.
C-Pimp: Your always involved and ready to help anyone in any way you can. I can honestly say that firsthand. I have to ask…what do you enjoy most about what you do? How do ya stay so up-beat all the time?
Kim: I don’t know, I never sleep ;) In all seriousness, I have two sort of rules about this business that allow me to keep on top of it and not get burnt out. First, don’t lie. It’s way too hard to support a lie and you’ll end up looking worse in the end. Some of my favorite people in the business may not be the most politically correct, but they aren’t hypocrites and that suits me. Second rule is not to take things personally. If you do, you’ll spend so much time worrying about he said, she said, that you will not be able to get any work done.
C-Pimp: On a lighter note, if you weren’t involved in the online adult business, what do you think you would be doing?
Kim: Sleeping. ;) I was on the non adult side of the business before I came to adult. I’ve run companies in the past, had a variety of things going on, all with the common thread of being on a paid what you’re worth basis. Even when I was in college I bartended, and tips are like commission. I don’t really know what I would be doing specifically, if I were to leave the industry now – this business does have it’s moments, but for me it’s fun. I could be working a lot harder with people I don’t like as opposed to being able to travel, see the people I do like, and just generally get things accomplished.
C-Pimp: That just about does it for this one Kim, I wanna thank you and CCBill for all it did for me in the past and for everything it’s doing today for countless adult webmasters. Your service and support is definitely top notch, I wish you the best. Thanks for the one-on-one…I know our Cozy readers will love it!
Kim: Sure thing, you know if there’s anything I can do, just email me. I don’t know all the answers (actually I am a technical dunce) but I usually know who to refer the questions to.
Hope you enjoyed the inerview. Hop on over to the CCBill website for all the details on what they have to offer. If you are looking for a company to handle your billing, give them a try, you won't be disapointed!
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