Quote:
Originally posted by gonzo@Feb 19 2004, 05:13 AM
Here are some questions that Ive got from the Monday night chat that people are unclear on or they felt you didnt answer. Feel free to use Oprano as your sounding board.
1. Did you ever find out what the descriptor was that a surfer will see when a charge is made to his card via solar billing?
2. How will you allow clients to transfer money to Paypal or Epassporte accounts since there is no transfer between Paypal and Epassporte for fraud control and you dont issue a card like they both do?
3. Exactly how are you going to use Verfied by Visa to do rebills when the surfer is the only person to hold the passkey? Will you notify the consumer each time hes going to be rebilled so he can pass you the number?
4. Can you explain your fraud control a little bit better? Your going to suspend the webmaster account or surfer account if they issue a chargeback? I was confused.
5. No one is still clear on how your going to port rebills over from CCBill and Ibill accounts. You said that the webmaster would transfer control of those accounts over to you and you would work some kind of port? What about my buddies at Jettis? Are you working with them too?
Im sure a few more folks from the show have questions but these are the ones that Ive gotten inquiries about so if any of the rest of you have specific questions for Bob from Solar Billing please post them here. Ive asked Bob to come and do a post show clarification.
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1. Did you ever find out what the descriptor was that a surfer will see when a charge is made to his card via solar billing?
ANSWER: It says Solar Billing Internet - that was a brain fart on my part forgetting it!
2. How will you allow clients to transfer money to Paypal or Epassporte accounts since there is no transfer between Paypal and Epassporte for fraud control and you dont issue a card like they both do?
ANSWER: We have our own internal fraud control that is designed to eliminate the money laundering possibilities, etc. Once the funds have passed our controls, then we are OK to release them to other systems such as PayPal, a user's bank account, etc. If a person funds their account using a credit card, funds can only go back into that card, so a person can't steal a card, fund an account, and then withdraw it into another card, bank account, etc. That really affects the users more than webmasters, however. Webmasters can withdraw funds to whatever system they choose, or by whatever method they choose. We do plan on issuing a card hopefully within 6-9 months whereby you can withdraw funds from an ATM machine and not even have to worry about those other systems. If I did not understand that question properly, please ask further on it.
3. Exactly how are you going to use Verfied by Visa to do rebills when the surfer is the only person to hold the passkey? Will you notify the consumer each time hes going to be rebilled so he can pass you the number?
ANSWER: As long as the surfer has funds in his account, we don't need the passkey to do a rebill. It will automatically come from his Solar Billing account. If there are insuffucient funds, the system is set up to automatically make an ACH transfer to fund the account.
4. Can you explain your fraud control a little bit better? Your going to suspend the webmaster account or surfer account if they issue a chargeback? I was confused.
ANSWER: We have a whole dispute process in place, and if you like, I can outline the whole thing. It's long, but we did it that way by working with the bank as part of our negotiations. First off, it is next to impossible for a user to sustain a chargeback due not only to the VbV system, but also because of the way the system is set up. A user is not using his credit card to join a site. He is using it ofund his account. If he is unhappy with the site, that is not an issue with Solar Billing, that is an issue between the user and the webmaster outside of our system. That being said, we do have a resolution process to assist in that dispute should it occur. IF a user wants to chargeback, the only thing he can say is that his account wasn't funded, which is what he is paying for. Of course, his account would have been funded, so he would have gotten exactly what he paid for. If there is an error on our side, like transferring the funds to the wrong account, that would not be the fault of the webmaster nor the user.
What we do is suspend the user's account until we figure out the fault, if any. What makes is complicated is that a user could fund his account for $100, say, and that $100 is split up amongst 5 webmasters, for example. If he wanted to chargeback the whole $100, there would be 5 other accounts involved. For that reason, we suspend the user's account only, until and unless we discover through our procedures that there is any reason to anything beyond that. Obviously, if that guy is suspended, his rebills would also have to be suspended pending the outcome, but that is all accounted for by the system.
We do not look at these things the same way that the credit card companies look at them, where the cardholder is always presumed to be right. We look at it objectively to determine what actually happened before passing judgment, which is the opposite of how they do it.
5. No one is still clear on how your going to port rebills over from CCBill and Ibill accounts. You said that the webmaster would transfer control of those accounts over to you and you would work some kind of port? What about my buddies at Jettis? Are you working with them too?
ANSWER: To be quite frank, the recent IBill developments have shifted our methods a bit, since it appears that they will no longer do adult at all. When exactly that is going to occur, however, I do not know. Apparently soon, though. We DO have a method, however, to take care of that problem, without everyone just getting shut off one day, but I don't really want to discuss it here in detail, for business reasons. Basically, I don't want someone else stealing our idea.
As for CCBill, it is simply a matter of reassignment, where we would take care of the fees that webmasters don't want to pay. In return, the accounts would be consolidated and funneled through Solar Billing, so nobody would lose any current CCBill accounts. We have not done anything with Jettis at this point. I can get into more detail on this as well, if someone wants to speak privately with me, for the same reasons I am reluctant to post our whole market strategy concerning IBill up here.
We tried to bring some real world practicality into the system, rather than just look at it as some adult webmasters trying to run a billing system, since we are much more than that. Those systems, as you know, have all failed because of that. If the system only appeals to one side and not the other, it's no good for anyone. You can't sell anything if there are no customers, and you can't buy anything if there are no merchants. We tried to find a middle ground where both sides would be satisfied, while not blatantly favoring one side over the other. To do otherwise would just lead us down the same road to failure as the other systems, and end up screwing people over once again, and we would ALL be back where we started!