CCBill's WMS Apology

Last year we signed up to use CCBill's new WMS hoping it would make administering our affiliate program easier for us and more feature-rich for you. Unfortunately it didn't work out the way we hoped it would.

The good news is EVERYTHING IS BACK TO NORMAL for our "legacy" affiliates according to ccbill in this apology AND new affiliates can signup like normal once again.

*****

While there are some positive aspects of the new WMS I am going to wait awhile before I invest any of my time in working with it, so if you signed up for WebWhoreBucks under the WMS (during the very brief amount of time between it forcing people to sign up that way and before I took down the signup form) please sign up again for a legacy account.

Of course I could write a litany of detailed complaints at this point, but it doesn't seem like it would be productive so I'm just trying to get back to business as usual and emphasize that I *do* trust things are fixed and back to the way they were pre-WMS and hope all of you are too.

To Stop Getting Affiliate Emails

We send emails containing promos and news to all of our affiliates via the CCBill admin. We do it that way so that your affiliate codes will be built into the links to save you time from having to login, look it up, then change the links yourself.

CCBill allows us to email all active affiliates or no active affiliates; there's no "email all active affiliates who've opted into email". Since CCBill doesn't provide an unsubscribe option or a way for you to continue getting paid to promote us WITHOUT getting emails sent through their admin, the only way *I* can stop you from getting the emails we send to affiliates is to make you an affiliate no more/deactivate you.

If that's what you want, write to me from the email address you receive news from us and confirm that you want your account deactivated in order to stop getting email from us.

The only other thing I can think of is for you to call ccbill or change your email account in the affiliate admin (I cannot change your email address or any other personal details for your account myself in the ccbill admin).

CCBill's New Affiliate System

After hearing rumours last year that CCBill was working on a new system for program owners to get marketing materials to affiliates I was SO excited to log into CCBill today and see them announce "Web Marketing System (WMS) is a new-generation affiliate system providing all the tools you need to easily and effectively manage your programs to maximize their performance and profitability."

Fuck. YEAH!

I just called up to be put on the list of sponsors who want to demo it. I'm guessing bigger clients will get a shot at it first, but even if that's the case I don't care because a) they'll have worked out the kinks by the time I get in on it, and b) once it's in place it should really help level the playing field for small operations like ours.

So many small program-owners don't even know how to customize their mailers so the promo links are ready for affiliates (I didn't even know we could do it myself until a few months ago) and without buying software or hiring a programmer yourself it's really difficult to customize your promo offerings, links, etc. to provide each affiliate exactly what s/he wants without giving them what they don't. I know as an affiliate I love promoting ccbill programs . . . all except for when it comes to getting the promo materials, link codes, etc. It's KIND OF a time-sucking nightmare with most sites. I definitely prefer harvesting promos from sponsors who use NATS, partly because it's pretty consistent from sponsor-to-sponsor and because I can customize what I want. I really really hope this new CCBill thing does all of that and more.

I didn't even bother checking the boards to see what people are saying before I called up (though I did get reassurance from CCBill that OLD LINKS WILL STILL WORK and THE NEW PROGRAM WILL RUN IN TANDEM WITH THE OLD so no work will be lost; affiliates who don't want to try it don't have to); whatever it's like it's bound to be better than what we have now. When I heard the rumours before I called and asked about it but the rep said he hadn't heard any such thing. I think that was during the phone call when I found out how to send out the mailers with the affiliates' numbers already built into the links. Anyhoo . . . good news. This will be a big help.