The PROS and CONS of NATS (post it all out right here)
 

I had a dream. I wanted to create a micro affiliate program for my site. So far my plan is working. In one month with just a few affiliates my site has generated over 450 signups. Now here is my dilema.

I'm just using CCBill. I like them because when I was working at TripleXCash, that's all we used at first, and they've always been good to me.

I see that I'm riding a winner with this site and I don't want to fuck anything up by leaving cash on the table, so I want to add cascading billing for my few affliates sake. I think we could all stand to earn a few more signups with a cascading setup.

I hear a lot of good and bad things about NATS. But I have never used it so I don't know what to believe. Please help me understand.

Please list everything you like and or dislike about NATS. What are NATS' PROS and CONS. Thanks. :)

CONS:

They way it manages ad material. Not easy to get all banners, you have to download each one of them individually.
Can not see how many active members you have (like you can at CCBill).

Pro for you: The money sits in your bank account until the affiliate hits the $100 (or whatever) min payout)

Con for webmasters: If their traffic does not do well on your sites, they may never get paid, leaving a bitter taste in their mouth about you.

What's up Redshoe?
Congrats on your site doing so well.

I am not familiar with NATS backend, so I can't comment on that part of it. However I am an affiliate of many programs using NATS, and my own feedback would be that it's easy to use. No problem finding promo material, link codes, and stats are show in a simple and easy to understand way.

A friend of mine uses NATS and he loves it. Easy to use and the fees are lower than MPA3 (which I have seen the inside and it is nice too).

PRO:
From a webmaster's stand point of promoting a sponsor using Nats, it shows the referring url for hits to the sites. All of them!!!! Not just the ones making sales.

From an affiliates point of view I absolutely love the way NATS handles stats and campaigns. My big beef with NATS is the encoded URLs (different ref code for every site), but I believe there is an option to allow the ref codes to be unencoded (and the fact that most of my sponsors on NATS choose not to enable it really chaps my ass). The way it handles promo material is a real pain as well.

Those are my pros and cons :)

As far as I know the Encode/Un-encode feature was installed as a visible tool on all NATS ver.2 installations – which is everyone by now. I know this because I can see it in my install. Are you sure you looked carefully? Because I don’t think a program owner would spend the time to get rid of the feature on purpose. There is just no reason to do that.

Click links, then Campaign, then Program… in the last step you should see Mode: Encode {Swith}.

when i worked with NATS, i found adding promotionals very easy once i got into the swing of it. and it's also very easy for affiliates to generate the linking codes they need. and you and your affiliates can track sales or hits by url, which is sweet.

why not offer ccbill as an option for those who are more comfortable getting paid by ccbill and offer the NATS program for the rest of us? that way everyone is covered.

best of luck to you with your new program :)

you know what... I've seen my fair share of cascading software. From the backend to the front end. What really bothers me is the code itself. Comming from someone that has programmed php I think it's the best software for your needs. It's well put together and very functional. which is more that I can for the rest of the software out there. Maybe they are getting better, who knows. Every program has thier flaws.

The only con I think is that you are limited to thier updates. special programming must be done on the side.