Paysite Owners: Are Online Checks Worth It?

[BigJohn]

Originally posted by Extreme John
Hmmmmm... Every business has it's risk thats for sure, but there's an old saying in retail, that can pretty much be used over and over in most business's.... "Don't merchandise your stores around the thieves, sales cure all ill's" now not many people are going to get that, but trust me it's true. There will always be theives in every business, cutting off revenue streams because of them is like cutting off your feet so you can stand better.

So if chargebacks became higher (assuimg Visa wouldnt cut your nuts off anyway), on your Visa purchases for whatever, does that mean you would only accept Mastercard?

There's plenty of options for checks, non of them in my mind include not taking them anymore. For 3 years I watched my CCBill check sales and rebills max out at X ammount daily & weekly, I watched iBill do the same damn thing, than I took the advice of a good friend of mine, and switched to Electracash (so be it the service isnt all that special), BUT the acceptance and collection rate is at least 3x Greater with them, than it ever was with CCbill & iBill put together, bottom line some comapnies do shit better than other companies, and I couldnt be any happier now that im with Electracash, maybe before I made 20-30% of the total $ seen from checks, and maybe just maybe 70-80% of the checks than were a fraud, who gives a shit, 20-30% of something is better than 100% of ZERO, and now that im with Electracash (and there are others out there too), im nailing down about 60-70% of Check Sales which is much better than 100% of ZERO.

Get my point? Give in to the thieves and EVERYONE LOSES, including the good guy who might only be in the 20% right now, that loves your site, he's at least 20% of something and he wants to give you his money. Let him give you his money!

You make some good points but over the last 2 weeks, 6 out of 6 checks were fradulent, not NSF, but totally bogus. Funky names like "Eye Gotu", "Frefor Mee", etc and/or totally bogus addresses with zips that don't match the states or states that don't match the city, etc.

I do a lot of programming work in retail for several Jewelry chains, right now I just happen to be working on credit card processing. Retail (from a visa/mastercard point of view) do "merchandise around thieves". I use to be able to implement a new credit card processor in 2 days, now with all of the checks and balances put into the data stream it takes me over a month! I've also implemented check authorization and it only takes me a day to write the code and certify with a new processor. There's a world of difference here!

Would I only use MC if I got excessive chargebacks from VISA? If the chargebacks were because VISA was letting through fraudulent, bogus charges, then yes I would. If I felt the check chargebacks had anything to do with the quality of my site I would fix my site. I can't battle with fake checks and I have no control over whether a check gets accepted or not.

Plus with every one of the fraudluent checks, the usernames and passwords were posted. Pennywize shut them down, but not before 6 or 7 people for each username sucked down a good portion of my site. I plan to talk to CCBill and to look around for other options, but for now, the best business decision I could make is to remove the check link. I can always add it back in a matter of minutes if I change my mind.

|ufo|